UNIVERSITY  OF  CA  RIVERSIDE  LIBRART 


VV^HY 

AUTHORS 

GO   WRONG 


GRANT  M.  OVERTON 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


WHY  AUTHORS    GO    WRONG 

AND 

OTHER    EXPLANATIONS 


WHY  AUTHORS 
GO  WRONG 

AND  OTHER  EXPLANATIONS 

BY 

GRANT  M.  OVERTON 

AUTHOR  OF   "the  WOMEN   WHO  MAKE  OUR   NOVELS" 


NEW  YORK 

MOFFAT,  YARD  &  COMPANY 

1919 


Copyright,  1919, 

BY 

MOFFAT,  YARD  tt  COMPANY 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.    Why  Authors  Go  Wrong      ....  i 

II.    A  Barbaric  Yawp 25 

III.  In  the  Critical  Court 39 

IV.  Book  "Reviewing" 51 

V.    Literary  Edivors,  by  One  of  Them     .  103 

VI.    What  Every  Publisher  Knows      .     ,  119 

VII.    The  Secret  of  the  Best  Seller     .     .  145 

VIII.    Writing  a  Novel 173 


WHY   AUTHORS    GO   WRONG 

AND 

OTHER     EXPLANATIONS 


WHY  AUTHORS  GO 
WRONG 

AND  OTHER  EXPLANATIONS 


WHY  AUTHORS  GO  WRONG 

THE  subject  of  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  is  one 
to  answering  which  a  book  might  adequately 
be  devoted  and  perhaps  we  shall  write  a  book  about 
it  one  of  these  days,  but  not  now.  When,  as  and 
if  written  the  book  dealing  with  the  question  will 
necessarily  show  the  misleading  nature  of  Mr. 
Arnold  Bennett's  title,  The  Truth  About  an 
Author — a  readable  little  volume  which  does  not 
tell  the  truth  about  an  author  in  general,  but  only 
what  we  are  politely  requested  to  accept  as  the  truth 
about  Arnold  Bennett.  Mr.  Bennett  may  or 
may  not  be  telling  the  truth  about  himself  in  that 
book;  his  regard  for  the  truth  in  respect  of  the 
characters  of  his  fiction  has  been  variable.  Perhaps 
he  is  more  scrupulous  when  it  comes  to  himself,  but 
we  are  at  liberty  to  doubt  it.     For  a  man  who  will 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


occasionally  paint  other  persons — even  fictionary 
persons — as  worse  than  they  really  are  may  not 
unnaturally  be  expected  to  depict  himself  as  some- 
what better  than  he  is. 

We  must  not  stay  with  Mr.  Bennett  any  longer 
just  now.  It  is  enough  that  he  has  not  been  content 
to  wait  for  the  curtain  to  rise  and  has  insisted  on 
thrusting  himself  into  our  prologue.  Exit;  and  let 
us  get  back  where  we  were. 

We  were  indicating  that  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 
is  an  extensive  subject.  It  is  so  extensive  because 
there  are  many  authors  and  many,  many  more 
readers.  It  is  extensive  because  it  is  a  moral  and 
not  a  literary  question,  a  human  and  not  an  artistic 
problem.  It  is  extensive  because  it  is  really  un- 
answerable and  anything  that  is  essentially  unan- 
swerable necessitates  prolonged  efforts  to  answer  it, 
this  on  the  well  known  theory  that  it  is  better  that 
many  be  bored  than  that  a  few  remain  dissatisfied. 


Let  us  take  up  these  considerations  one  by  one. 

It  seems  unlikely  that  any  one  will  misunderstand 
the  precise  subject  itself.  What,  exactly,  is  meant 
by  an  author  "going  wrong"?  The  familiar  eu- 
phemism, as  perhaps  most  frequently  used,  is  any- 
thing but  ambiguous.  Ambiguous-sounding  words 
are  generally  fraught  with  a  deadly  and  specific 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


meaning — another  illustration  of  the  eternal  para- 
dox of  sound  and  sense. 

But  as  used  in  the  instance  of  an  author,  "going 
wrong"  has  a  great  variety  of  meanings.  An  au- 
thor has  gone  wrong,  for  example,  when  he  has 
deliberately  done  work  under  his  best;  he  has  gone 
wrong  when  he  has  written  for  sentimental  or  les- 
thetic  reasons  and  not,  as  he  should,  for  money 
primarily ;  he  has  gone  wrong  when  he  tries  to  uplift 
or  educate  his  readers ;  he  has  gone  wrong  when  he 
has  written  too  many  books,  or  has  not  written 
enough  books,  or  has  written  too  fast  or  not  fast 
enough,  or  has  written  what  he  saw  and  not  what 
he  felt,  or  what  he  felt  and  not  what  he  saw,  or 
posed  in  any  fashion  whatsoever. 

Ezra  Pound,  for  example,  has  gone  atrociously 
wrong  by  becoming  a  French  Decadent  instead  of 
remaining  a  son  of  Idaho  and  growing  up  to  be  an 
American.  Of  course  as  a  French  Decadent  he  will 
always  be  a  failure;  as  Benjamin  De  Casseres 
puts  it,  "the  reality  underlying  his  exquisite  art  is 
bourgeois  and  American.  He  is  a  ghost  material- 
ized by  cunning  effects  of  lights  and  mirrors." 


Mr.  Robert  W.  Chambers  went  wrong  in  an  en- 
tirely different  fashion.  The  usual  charge  brought 
against  Mr.  Chambers  is  that  he  consented  to  do 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


less  than  his  best  because  it  profited  him.  This  is 
entirely  untrue.  Mr.  Chambers's  one  mistake  was 
that  lie  did  not  write  to  make  money.  Every 
writer  should,  because  writing  is  a  business  and  a 
business  is  something  which  can  only  be  decently 
conducted  with  that  end  in  view.  Fancy  a  real 
estate  business  which  should  not  be  conducted  to 
make  money !  We  should  have  to  stop  it  imme- 
diately. It  would  be  a  menace  to  the  community, 
for  there  is  no  telling  what  wickedness  of  purpose 
might  lie  behind  it.  A  business  not  conducted  pri- 
marily to  make  money  is  not  a  business  but  a  blind ; 
and  very  likely  a  cover  for  operations  of  a  criminal 
character.  The  safety  of  mankind  lies  in  knowing 
motives  and  is  imperilled  by  any  enterprise  that 
disguises  them. 

And  so  for  Mr.  Qiambers  to  refrain  deliberately 
from  writing  to  make  money  was  a  very  wrong 
thing  for  him  to  do.  Far  from  having  a  wicked 
motive,  he  had  a  highly  creditable  motive,  which 
does  not  excuse  him  in  the  least.  His  praiseworthy 
purpose  was  to  write  the  best  that  was  in  him  for 
the  sake  of  giving  pleasure  to  the  widest  possible 
number  of  his  readers.  There  does  not  seem  to  be 
much  doubt  that  he  has  done  it;  those  who  most 
disapprove  of  him  will  hardly  deny  that  the  vast 
sales  of  his  half  a  hundred  stories  are  incontestable 
evidence  of  his  success  in  his  aim.  But  what  is 
the  result  ?    On  every  hand  he  is  misjudged  and  con- 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


demned.  He  is  accused  of  acting  on  the  right 
motive,  which  is  called  wrong!  He  is  not  blamed, 
as  he  should  be,  for  acting  on  a  wrong  motive,  which 
would,  if  understood,  have  been  called  right!  What 
he  should  have  done,  of  course,  was  to  write  sanely 
and  consistently  to  make  money,  as  did  Amelia  Barr. 
Mrs.  Barr  was  not  a  victim  of  widespread  contem- 
porary injustice  and  Mr.  Chambers  is  and  will 
remain  so. 

Take  another  illustration — Mr.  Winston  Church- 
ill. One  of  the  ablest  living  American  novelists, 
he  has  gone  so  wrong  that  it  cannot  honestly  be  suj>- 
posed  he  will  ever  go  right  again.  His  earlier  novels 
were  not  only  delightful  but  actually  important.  His 
later  novels  are  intolerable.  In  such  a  novel  as  The 
Inside  of  the  Cup  Mr.  Churchill  is  not  writing  with 
the  honorable  and  matter-of-course  object  of  selling 
a  large  number  of  copies  and  getting  an  income  from 
them;  he  is  writing  with  the  dishonorable  and  un- 
avowed  object  of  setting  certain  ideas  before  you, 
the  contemplation  of  which  will,  in  his  opinion,  do 
you  good.  He  wants  you  to  think  about  the  horror 
of  a  clergyman  in  leading  strings  to  his  wealthiest 
parishioner.  As  a  fact,  there  is  no  horror  in  such 
a  situation  and  Mr.  Churchill  cannot  conjure  up  any. 
There  is  no  horror,  there  are  only  two  fools.  Now 
if  a  man  is  a  fool,  he's  a  fool;  he  cannot  become 
anything  else,  least  of  all  a  sensible  man.  A  clergy- 
man in  thrall  to  a  rich  individual  of  his  congrega- 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


tion  is  a  fool;  and  to  picture  him  as  painfully  eman- 
cipating himself  and  becoming  not  only  sensible  but, 
as  it  were,  heroic  is  to  ask  us  to  accept  a  contradic- 
tion in  terms.  For  a  fool  is  not  a  man  who  lacks 
sense,  but  a  man  who  cannot  acquire  sense.  Not 
even  a  miracle  can  make  him  sensible;  if  it  could 
there  would  be  no  trouble  with  The  Inside  of  the 
Cup,  for  a  miracle,  being,  as  G.  K.  Chesterton  says, 
merely  an  exceptional  occurrence,  will  always  be 
acquiesced  in  by  the  intelligent  reader. 


It  would  be  possible  to  continue  at  great  length 
giving  examples  of  authors  who  have  gone  wrong 
and  specifying  the  fifty-seven  varieties  of  ways  they 
have  erred.  But  the  mere  enumeration  of  fallen 
authors  is  terribly  depressing  and  quite  useless.  If 
we  are  to  accomplish  any  good  end  we  must  try  to 
find  out  why  they  have  allowed  themselves  to  be  de- 
ceived or  betra3'ed  and  what  can  be  done  in  the  shape 
of  rescue  work  or  preventive  effort  in  the  future. 
Perhaps  we  can  reclaim  some  of  them  and  guide 
others  aright. 

After  a  consideration  of  cases — we  shall  not  clog 
the  discussion  with  statistics  and  shall  confine  our- 
selves to  general  results — we  have  been  led  by  all  the 
evidence  to  the  conclusion  that  the  principal  trouble 
is  with  the  authors.    Little  or  none  of  the  blame  for 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  7 

the  unfortunate  situation  rests  on  their  readers.  In- 
deed, in  the  majority  of  cases  the  readers  are  the 
great  and  unyielding  force  making  for  sanity  and 
virtue  in  the  author.  Without  the  persistent  moral 
pressure  exerted  by  their  readers  many,  many  more 
authors  would  certainly  stray  from  the  path  of  busi- 
ness rectitude — not  literary  rectitude,  for  there  is  no 
such  thing.  What  is  humanly  right  is  right  in 
letters  and  nothing  is  right  in  letters  that  is  wrong  in 
the  world. 

The  commonest  way  in  which  authors  go  wrong 
is  one  already  stated :  By  ceasing  to  write  primarily 
for  money,  for  a  living  and  as  much  more  as  may 
come  the  writer's  way.  The  commonest  reason  why 
authors  go  wrong  in  this  way  is  comical — or  would 
be  if  it  were  not  so  common.  They  feel  ashamed  to 
write  for  money  first  and  last;  they  are  seized  with 
an  absurd  idea  that  there  is  something  implicitly  dis- 
graceful in  acting  upon  such  a  motive.  And  so  to 
avoid  something  that  they  falsely  imagine  to  be  dis- 
graceful they  do  something  that  they  know  is  dis- 
graceful ;  they  write  from  some  other  motive  and  let 
the  reader  innocently  think  they  are  writing  with  the 
old  and  normal  and  honorable  motive. 

So  widespread  is  this  delusion  that  it  is  abso- 
lutely necessary  to  digress  for  a  moment  and  explain 
why  writing  to  make  money  is  respectable !  Why  is 
anything  respectable?  Because  it  meets  a  human 
necessity  and  meets  it  in  an  open  and  aboveboard 


8  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

fashion  without  detriment  to  society  in  general  or 
the  individual  in  particular.  All  lawful  business 
conforms  to  this  definition  and  writing  for  money 
certainly  does.  Writing — or  painting  or  sculptur- 
ing or  anything  else — not  done  to  make  money  is 
not  respectable  because  ( i )  it  meets  no  human  ne- 
cessity, (2)  it  is  not  done  openly  and  aboveboard, 
(3)  it  is  invariably  detrimental  to  society,  and  (4) 
it  is  nearly  always  harmful  to  individuals,  and  most 
harmful  to  the  individual  engaged  upon  it. 

It  is  useless  to  say  that  a  man  who  writes  or 
paints  or  carves  for  something  other  than  money 
meets  a  human  necessity — a  spiritual  thirst  for 
beauty,  perhaps.  There  is  no  spiritual  thirst  for 
beauty  which  cannot  be  satisfied  completely  by  work 
done  for  an  adequate  and  monetary  reward.  And 
to  satisfy  the  human  longing  for  the  beautiful  with- 
out requiring  a  proper  price  is  to  demoralize  society 
by  showing  men  that  they  can  have  something  for 
nothing. 


Now  it  is  just  here  that  the  moral  pressure  of  the 
great  body  of  readers  is  felt,  a  pressure  that  is 
constantly  misunderstood  by  the  author.  So  surely 
as  the  writer  has  turned  from  writing  to  make 
money  and  has  taken  up  writing  for  art's  sake 
(whatever  that  means)  or  writing  for  some  ethical 
purpose  or  writing  in  the  interest  of  some  propa- 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


ganda,  though  it  be  merely  the  propaganda  of  his 
own  poor,  single  intellect — just  so  surely  as  he  has 
done  this  his  readers  find  him  out.  Whether  they 
then  continue  to  read  him  or  not  depends  entirely  on 
what  they  think  of  his  new  and  unavowed  (but 
patent)  motive.  Of  course  readers  ought  to  be 
stern ;  having  caught  their  author  in  a  wrong  motive 
they  ought  to  punish  him  by  deserting  him  instantly. 
But  readers  are  human;  they  are  even  surprising- 
ly selfish  at  times;  they  are  capable  of  considering 
their  own  enjoyment,  and,  dreadful  to  say,  they  are 
capable  of  considering  it  first.  So  if,  as  in  the  case 
of  Mr.  Chambers,  they  find  his  new  motive  friendly 
and  flattering  they  read  him  more  than  ever ;  on  the 
other  hand,  if  they  find  the  changed  purpose  dis- 
agreeable or  tiresome,  aiming  to  uplift  them  or  to 
shock  them  unpleasantly  or  (sometimes)  to  make 
fun  of  them,  they  quit  that  author  cold.  And  they 
hardly  ever  come  back.  Usually  the  author  is  not 
perspicacious  enough  to  grasp  the  cause  of  the  de- 
fection; it  is  amazing  how  seldom  authors  think 
there  can  be  anything  wrong  with  themselves.  Usu- 
ally the  abandoned  author  goes  right  over  and  joins 
a  small  sect  of  highbrows  and  proclaims  the  deplor- 
able state  of  his  national  literature.  "The  public 
be  damned!"  he  says  in  effect,  but  the  public  is  not 
damned,  it  is  he  that  is  damned,  and  the  public  has 
done  its  utmost  to  save  him. 

Sometimes  an  author  deliberately  does  work  that 


lo  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

is  less  than  his  best,  but  he  never  does  this  with  the 
idea  of  making  money,  or,  if  he  entertains  that  idea, 
he  fools  no  one  but  himself.  There  are  known  and 
even  (we  believe)  recorded  instances  of  an  author 
ridiculing  his  own  output  and  avowing  with  what 
he  probably  thought  audacious  candor :  "Of  course, 
this  latest  story  of  mine  is  junk — but  it'll  sell  loo,- 
ooo  copies !" 

It  never  does.  The  author  is  perfectly  truthful 
in  describing  the  book  as  worthless.  If  he  implies 
as  he  always  will  in  such  a  case  that  he  deliberately 
did  less  than  his  best  he  is  an  unconscious  liar.  It 
was  his  best  and  its  worthlessness  was  solely  the  re- 
sult of  his  total  insincerity.  For  a  man  or  woman 
may  write  a  very  bad  book  and  write  it  with  an  ut- 
ter sincerity  that  will  sell  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
copies ;  but  no  one  can  write  a  very  fine  book  insin- 
cerely and  have  it  sell. 

The  author  who  thinks  that  he  has  written  a 
rather  inferior  novel  for  the  sake  of  huge  royalties 
has  actually  written  the  best  he  has  in  him,  namely, 
a  piece  of  cheese.  The  author  who  has  actually 
written  beneath  his  best  has  not  done  it  for  money, 
but  to  avoid  making  money.  He  thinks  it  is  his 
best;  he  thinks  it  is  something  utterly  artistic, 
aesthetically  wonderful,  highbrowedly  pure,  lofty  and 
serene;  he  scorns  money;  to  make  money  by  it 
would  be  to  soil  it.  What  he  cannot  see  is  that  it 
is  not  his  best ;  that  it  is  very  likely  quite  his  worst ; 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  ii 

that  when  he  has  done  his  best  he  will  unavoidably 
make  money  unless,  like  the  misguided  mortal  we 
have  just  mentioned,  deep  insincerity  vitiates  his 
work. 

We  are  therefore  ready,  before  going  further,  to 
formulate  certain  paradoxical  principles  governing 
all  literarv  work. 


To  understand  why  authors  go  wrong  we  must 
first  understand  how  authors  may  go  right.  The 
paradoxical  rules  which  if  observed  will  hold  the 
author  to  the  path  of  virtue  and  rectitude  may  be 
formulated  briefly  as  follows  : 

1.  An  author  must  write  to  make  money  first  of 
all,  and  every  other  purpose  must  be  secondary  to 
this  purpose  of  money  making. 

The  paradoxy  inherent  in  this  principle  is  that 
while  writing  the  author  must  never  for  a  single 
moment  think  of  the  money  he  may  make. 

2.  Every  writer  must  have  a  stern  and  insistent 
moral  purpose  in  his  writing,  and  especially  must  he 
be  animated  by  this  purpose  if  he  is  writing  fiction. 

The  paradoxy  here  is  that  never,  under  any  cir- 
cumstances, may  the  writer  exhibit  his  moral  pur- 
pose in  his  work. 

3.  A  writer  must  not  write  too  much  nor  must 
he  write  too  little.     He  is  writing  too  much  if  his 


12  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

successive  books  sell  better  and  better;  he  is  writ- 
ing too  little  if  each  book  shows  declining  sales. 

This  may  appear  paradoxical,  but  consider:  If 
the  writer's  work  is  selling  with  accelerated  speed 
the  market  for  his  wares  will  very  quickly  be  over- 
supplied.  This  happened  to  Mr.  Kipling  one  day. 
He  had  the  wisdom  to  stop  writing  almost  entirely, 
to  let  his  production  fall  to  an  attenuated  trickle; 
with  the  result  that  saturation  was  avoided,  and 
there  is  now  and  will  long  continue  to  be  a  good, 
brisk,  steady  demand  for  his  product. 

On  the  other  hand,  consider  the  case  of  Mrs. 
Blank  (the  reader  will  not  expect  us  to  be  either 
so  ungallant  or  so  professionally  unethical  or  so 
commercially  unfair  as  to  give  her  name).  Mrs. 
Blank  wrote  a  book  every  two  or  three  years,  and 
each  was  more  of  a  plug  than  its  predecessor.  She 
began  writing  a  book  a  year,  and  the  third  volume 
under  her  altered  schedule  was  a  best  seller.  It  was 
also  her  best  novel. 


Then  why?  why?  why?  do  the  authors  go  wrong? 
Because,  if  we  must  say  it  in  plain  English,  they 
disregard  every  principle  of  successful  authorship. 
When  they  have  written  a  book  or  two  and  have 
made  money  they  get  it  into  their  heads  that  it  is 
ignoble  to  write  for  money  and  they  try  to  write 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  13 

for  something  else — for  Art,  usually.  But  it  is  im- 
possible to  write  for  Art,  for  Art  is  not  an  end  but 
a  means.  When  they  do  not  try  to  write  for  Art 
they  try  to  write  for  an  Ethical  Purpose,  but  they 
exhibit  it  as  inescapably  as  if  the  book  were  a  pulpit 
and  the  reader  were  sitting  in  a  pew.  Indeed,  some 
modern  fiction  cannot  be  read  unless  you  are  sitting 
in  a  pew,  and  a  very  stiff  and  straight  backed  pew 
at  that ;  not  one  of  these  old  fashioned,  roomy,  high 
walled  family  pews  such  as  Dickens  let  us  sit  in, 
pews  in  which  one  could  be  comfortable  and  easy 
and  which  held  the  whole  family,  pews  in  which 
you  could  box  the  children's  ears  lightly  without 
doing  it  publicly;  no!  the  pews  the  novelists  make 
us  sit  in  these  days  are  these  confounded  modern 
pews  which  stop  with  a  jab  in  the  small  of  your 
back  and  which  are  no  better  than  public  benches, 
but  are  intensely  more  uncomfortable — pews  iu 
which,  to  ease  your  misery,  you  can  do  nothing  but 
look  for  the  mote  in  your  neighbor's  eye  and  the 
wrong  color  in  your  neighbor's  cravat. 

Because — to  get  back  to  the  whys  of  the  authors 
— because  when  they  are  popular  they  overpopu- 
larize  themselves,  and  when  they  are  unpopular 
they  lack  the  gumption  to  write  more  steadily  and 
fight  more  gamely  for  recognition.  We  don't  mean 
critical  recognition,  but  popular  recognition.  How 
can  an  author  expect  the  public,  his  public,  any  pub- 
lic, to  go  on  swallowing  him  in  increased  amounts 


14  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

at  meals  placed  ever  closer  together — for  any  length 
of  time?  And  how,  equally,  can  an  author  expect  a 
public,  his  public,  or  any  public,  to  acquire  a  taste  for 
his  work  when  he  serves  them  a  sample  once  a  week, 
then  once  a  month,  then  once  a  year?  Why,  a  per- 
son could  not  acquire  a  taste  for  olives  that  way. 

8 

We  have  no  desire  to  be  personal  for  the  sake  of 
being  personal,  but  we  have  every  desire  to  be  per- 
sonal in  this  discussion  for  the  sake  of  being  im- 
personal, pointed,  helpful  and  clear.  It  is  time  to 
take  a  perfectly  fresh  and  perfectly  illustrative  ex- 
ample of  how  not  to  write  fiction.  We  shall  take 
the  case  of  Mr.  Owen  Johnson  and  his  new  novel, 
Virtuous  Wives. 

Mr.  Johnson  will  be  suspected  by  the  dense  and 
conventional  censors  of  American  literature  of  hav- 
ing written  Virtuous  Wives  to  make  money.  Alack- 
aday,  no!  If  he  had  a  much  better  book  might 
have  come  from  his  typewriter.  Mr.  Johnson  was 
not  thinking  primarily  of  money,  as  he  should  have 
been  (prior  to  the  actual  writing  of  the  story).  He 
was  filled  with  a  moral  and  uplifting  aim.  He  had 
been  shocked  to  the  marrow  by  the  spectacle  of  the 
lives  led  by  some  New  York  women — the  kind  Alice 
Duer  Miller  writes  discreetly  about.  The  partici- 
pation of  America  in  the  war  had  not  begun.    The 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  15 

performances  of  an  inconsiderable  few  were  unduly- 
conspicuous.  Mr.  Johnson  decided  to  write  a  novel 
that  would  hold  up  these  disgusting  triflers  (and 
worse)  to  the  scorn  of  sane  and  decent  Americans. 
He  set  to  work.  He  finished  his  book.  It  was 
serialized  in  one  of  the  several  magazines  which 
have  displaced  forever  the  old  Sunday  school  library 
in  the  field  of  Awful  Warning  literature.  In  these 
forums  Mr.  Galsworthy  and  Gouverneur  Morris  in- 
scribe our  present  day  chronicles  of  the  Schoenberg- 
Cotta  family,  and  writ  large  over  their  instalments, 
as  part  of  the  editorial  blurb,  we  read  the  expression 
of  a  fervent  belief  that  Vice  has  never  been  so  Pow- 
erfully, Brilliantly  and  Convincingly  Depicted  in  All 
Its  Horror  by  Any  Pen.     But  we  divagate. 

Mr.  Johnson's  novel  was  printed  serially  and  ap- 
peared then  as  a  book  with  a  solemn  preface — the 
final  indecent  exhibition,  outside  of  the  story  itself, 
of  his  serious  moral  purpose.  And  as  a  book  it  is 
failing  utterly  of  its  purpose.  It  has  sold  and  is 
selling  and  Mr.  Johnson  is  making  and  will  make 
money  out  of  it — which  is  what  he  did  not  want. 
What  he  did  want  he  made  impossible  when  he  un- 
masked his  great  aim. 

The  world  may  be  perverse,  but  you  have  to  take 
it  as  it  is.  The  world  may  be  childish,  but  none 
of  us  will  live  to  see  it  grow  up.  If  the  world  thinks 
you  write  with  the  honest  and  understandable  ob- 
ject of  making  a  living  it  attributes  no  ulterior  mo- 


1 6  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

tive  to  you.  The  world  says :  "Jc>hn  Smith,  the 
butcher,  sells  me  beeksteak  in  order  to  buy  Mrs. 
Smith  a  new  hat  and  the  little  Smiths  shoes."  The 
world  buys  the  steaks  and  relishes  them.  But  if 
John  Smith  tells  the  world  and  his  wife  every  time 
they  come  to  his  shop :  'T  am  selling  you  this  large, 
juicy  steak  to  give  you  good  red  blood  and  make 
you  Fit,"  then  the  world  and  his  wife  are  resentful 
and  say :  "We  think  we  don't  like  your  large,  juicy 
steaks.  We  are  red  blooded  enough  to  have  our 
own  preferences.  We  will  just  go  on  down  the 
street  to  the  delicatessen — we  mean  the  Liberty  food 
shop — and  buy  some  de-Hohenzollernized  frank- 
furters, the  well  known  Liberty  sausage.  To  hell 
with  the  Kaiser!"  And  so  John  Smith  merely 
makes  money.  Oh,  yes,  he  makes  money;  a  large, 
juicy  steak  is  a  large,  juicy  steak  no  matter  how 
deadly  the  good  intent  in  selling  it.  But  John  Smith 
is  defeated  in  his  real  purpose.  He  does  not  fur- 
nish the  world  and  his  wife  with  the  red  corpuscles 
he  yearned  to  give  them. 


At  this  juncture  we  seem  to  hear  exasperated 
cries  of  this  character:  "What  do  you  mean  by 
saying  that  an  author  must  write  for  money  first 
and  last  and  yet  must  have  a  stern  moral  purpose? 
How  can  the  two  be  reconciled?     Why  must  he 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  17 

think  of  money  until  he  begins  to  write  and  never 
after  he  begins  to  write?  We  understand  why  the 
moral  object  must  not  obtrude  itself,  but  why  need 
it  be  there  at  all?" 

Can  a  man  serve  two  masters?  Can  he  serve 
money  and  morality?  Foolish  question  No.  58,914! 
He  not  only  can  but  he  always  does  when  his  work 
is  good. 

A  painter — a  good  painter — is  a  man  who  burns 
to  enrich  the  world  with  his  work  and  is  determined 
to  make  the  world  pay  him  decently  for  it.  A 
good  sculptor  is  a  man  who  has  gritted  his  teeth 
with  a  resolution  to  give  the  world  certain  beautiful 
figures  for  which  the  world  must  reward  him — or 
he  will  know  the  reason  why !  A  good  corset  manu- 
facturer is  a  man  who  is  filled  with  an  almost  holy 
yearning  to  make  people  more  shapely  and  more 
comfortable  than  he  found  them — and  he  is  fanati- 
cally resolved  that  they  shall  acknowledge  his 
achievement  by  making  him  rich ! 

For  that's  the  whole  secret.  How  is  a  man  to 
know  that  he  has  painted  great  portraits  or  land- 
scapes or  carved  lovely  monuments  or  made  thou- 
sands shapelier  and  more  easeful  if  not  by  the  money 
they  paid  him  ?  How  is  an  author  to  know  that  he 
has  amused  or  instructed  thousands  if  not  by  the 
size  of  his  royalty  checks?  By  hearsay?  By  mind 
reading?  By  plucking  the  petals  of  a  daisy — "They 
love  me.    They  love  me  not"? 


1 8  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Every  man  can  and  must  serve  two  masters,  but 
the  one  is  the  thing  that  masters  him  and  the  other 
is  the  evidence  of  his  mastery.  Every  man  must 
before  beginning  work  fix  his  mind  intently  upon 
the  making  of  money,  the  money  which  shall  be 
an  evidence  of  his  mastery;  every  man  on  begin- 
ning work  and  for  the  duration  of  the  work  must 
fix  his  mind  intently  and  exclusively  on  the  service 
of  morality,  the  great  master  whose  slave  he  is  in 
the  execution  of  an  Invisible  Purpose.  And  no 
man  dare  let  his  moral  purpose  expose  itself  in  his 
work,  for  to  do  that  is  to  do  a  presumptuous  and 
sacrilegious  thing.  The  Great  Moralizer,  who  has 
in  his  hands  each  little  one  of  us  workers,  holds  his 
Purpose  invisible  to  us ;  how  then  can  we  venture 
to  make  visible  what  He  keeps  invisible,  how  can 
we  have  the  audacity  to  practice  a  technique  that 
He  Himself  does  not  employ? 

For  He  made  the  world  and  all  that  is  in  it. 
And  He  made  it  with  a  moral  end  in  view,  as  we 
most  of  us  believe.  But  not  the  wisest  of  us  pre- 
tends that  that  moral  object  is  clearly  visible.  It 
does  not  disclose  itself  to  us  directly ;  we  are  aware 
of  it  only  indirectly;  and  are  influenced  by  it  for- 
evermore.  If  the  world  was  so  made,  who  are  we 
that  think  ourselves  so  much  more  adroit  than  Him 
as  to  be  able  to  expose  boldly  what  He  veils  and 
to  reveal  what  He  hath  hidden? 

There  are  those,  of  course,  who  see  no  moral  ex- 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  19 

planation  of  the  universe;  but  they  are  not  always 
consistent.  There  is  that  famous  passage  of 
Joseph  Conrad's  in  which  he  declines  the  ethical 
view  and  says  he  would  fondly  regard  the  pano- 
rama of  creation  as  pure  spectacle — the  marvellous 
spectacle  being,  perchance,  a  moral  end  in  itself. 
And  yet  no  man  ever  wrote  with  a  deeper  mani- 
festation and  a  more  perfect  concealment  of  his 
moral  purpose  than  Conrad;  for  exactly  the  thing 
to  which  all  his  tales  are  passionate  witnesses  is  the 
sense  of  fidelity,  of  loyalty,  of  endurance — above 
all,  the  sense  of  fidelity — that  exists  in  mankind, 
Man,  in  the  Conradist  view,  is  a  creature  of  an 
inexhaustible  loyalty  to  himself  and  to  his  fellows. 
This  inner  and  utter  fidelity  it  is  which  makes  the 
whole  legend  of  Lord  Jim,  which  is  the  despairing 
cry  that  rings  out  at  the  last  in  Victory,  which 
reaches  lyric  heights  in  Youth,  which  is  the  pro- 
found pathos  of  The  End  of  the  Tether,  which,  in 
its  corruption  by  an  incorruptible  metal,  the  silver 
of  the  mine,  forms  the  dreadful  tragedy  of  Nos- 
tronio.  An  immortal,  Conrad,  but  not  the  admir- 
ing and  passive  spectator  he  diffidently  declares 
himself  to  be! 


10 

Have  we  covered  all  the  cases?     Obviously  not. 
It  is  no  more  possible  to  deal  with  all  the  authors 


20  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

who  go  wrong  than  it  is  to  call  all  the  sinners  to 
repentance.  But  sin  is  primarily  a  question  be- 
tween the  sinner  and  his  own  conscience,  and  the 
errors  of  authors  are  invariably  questions  be- 
tween the  authors  and  the  public.  The  public  is 
the  best  conscience  many  an  author  has;  and  the 
substitution  of  a  private  self-justification  for  a  pub- 
lic vindication  has  seldom  been  a  markedly  suc- 
cessful undertaking  in  human  history.  Yet  there 
is  a  class  of  writers  for  whom  no  public  vindica- 
tion is  possible;  who  affect,  indeed,  to  scorn  it; 
who  set  themselves  up  as  little  gods.  They  are 
the  worshippers  of  Art.  They  are  the  ones  who 
not  only  do  not  admit  but  who  deliberately  deny 
a  moral  purpose  in  anything;  who  think  that  a 
something  they  call  pure  Beauty  is  the  sole  end  of 
existence,  of  work,  of  life,  and  is  alone  to  be  wor- 
shipped.    It  is  a  cult  of  Baal. 

For  these  Artists  despise  money,  and  in  despis- 
ing money  they  cheapen  themselves  and  become 
creatures  of  barter.  They  sneer  at  morality  and 
reject  it;  immediately  the  world  disappears:  "And 
the  earth  was  without  form,  and  void."  They  de- 
moralize honest  people  with  whom  they  come  in 
contact  by  demolishing  the  possibly  imperfect  but 
really  workable  standards  which  govern  normal 
lives — and  never  replacing  them.  What  is  their 
Beauty?  It  is  what  each  one  of  them  thinks  beau- 
tiful.    What  is  their  Art?     It  is  what  each  cold 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong  21 

Httle  selfish  soul  among  them  chooses  to  call  Art. 
What  is  their  achievement?  Self-destruction. 
They  are  the  spiritual  suicides,  they  are  the  moral 
defectives,  they  are  the  outcasts  of  humanity,  the 
lepers  among  the  workers  of  the  world.  For  them 
there  can  be  neither  pity  nor  forgiveness;  for  they 
deny  the  beauty  of  rewarded  toil,  the  sincerity  of 
honest  labor,  the  mystical  humanity  of  man. 

Of  them  no  more.  Let  us  go  back  in  a  closing 
moment  to  the  contemplation  of  the  great  body  of 
men  and  women  who  labor  cheerfully  and  honor- 
ably, if  rather  often  somewhat  mistakenly,  to  make 
their  living,  to  do'  good  work  and  make  the  world 
pay  them  for  it,  yet  leaving  with  the  world  the 
firm  conviction  that  it  has  had  a  little  the  better 
of  the  bargain !  These  are  the  authors  who  "go 
wrong,"  and  with  whose  well  meant  errors  we  have 
been  dealing,  not  very  methodically  but  perhaps 
not  unhelpfully.  Is  there,  then,  no  parting  word 
of  advice  we  can  give  our  authors?  To  be  sure 
there  is!  When  our  authors  are  quite  sure  they 
will  not  go  wrong,  they  may  go  write ! 


A  BARBARIC  YAWP 


II 


A   BARBARIC    YAWP 


IT  was  the  handy  phrase  to  describe  Wah  Whit- 
man: The  "barbaric  yawp."  In  its  elegant 
inelegance  the  neatly  adjectived  noun  was  felt  to 
be  really  brilliant.  Stump  speakers  "made  the 
eagle  scream" ;  a  chap  like  Whitman  had  to  be  char- 
acterized handily  too. 

The  epigrammatic  mind  is  the  card  index  mind. 
Now  the  remarkable  thing  about  the  card  index  is 
its  casualty  list.  People  who  card  index  things  are 
people  who  proceed  to  forget  those  things.  The 
same  metal  rod  that  transfixes  the  perforated  cards 
pierces  the  indexers'  brains.  A  mechanical  device 
has  been  called  into  play.  Brains  are  unnecessary 
any  more.  The  day  of  pigeonholes  was  slightly 
better;  for  the  pigeonholes  were  not  unlike  the 
human  brain  in  which  things  are  tucked  away  to- 
gether, because  they  really  have  some  association 
with  each  other.  But  the  card  index  alphabetizes 
ruthlessly.     Fancy  an  alphabetical  brain! 

Epigrams  are  like  that.  A  man  cannot  take  the 
trouble  to  think ;  he  falls  back  on  an  epigram.  He 
cannot  take  the  trouble  to  remember  and  so  he 
card   indexes.     The   upshot   is   that   he   can   find 

25 


26  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

nothing  in  the  card  index  and  of  course  has  no 
recollection  to  fall  back  on.  Or  he  recalls  the  epi- 
gram without  having  the  slightest  idea  what  it  was 
meant  to  signify. 

But  this  is  not  to  be  about  card  indexes  nor  even 
about  epigrams.  It  is  to  be  a  barbaric  yawp,  by 
which  it  is  to  be  supposed  was  once  meant  the  happy 
consciousness  and  the  proud  wonder  that  struck 
into  the  heart  of  an  American  poet.  Whitman  was 
not  so  much  a  poet  as  the  chantey  man  of  Longfel- 
low's Ship  of  State.  There  was  an  hour  when  the 
chanteyman  had  an  inspiration,  when  he  saw  as 
by  an  apocalyptic  light  all  the  people  of  these 
United  States  linked  and  joined  in  a  common  effort. 
Every  man,  woman  and  child  of  the  millions  tailed 
on  the  rope ;  every  one  of  them  put  his  weight  and 
muscle  to  the  task.  It  was  a  tremendous  hour.  It 
was  the  hour  of  a  common  effort.  It  was  the  hour 
for  which,  Walt  felt,  men  had  risked  their  lives 
a  century  earlier.  It  was  a  revealed  hour;  it  had 
not  yet  arrived;  but  it  was  sure  to  come.  And  in 
the  glow  of  that  revelation  the  singer  lifted  up  his 
voice  and  sang.  .  .  .  God  grant  he  may  be  hearing 
the  mighty  chorus  I 


America  is  not  a  land,  but  a  people.     And  a 
people  may  have  no  land  and  still  they  will  remain 


A  Barbaric  Yawp  27 

a  people.  There  has,  for  years,  been  no  country 
of  Poland;  but  there  are  Poles.  There  has  been 
a  country  of  Russia  for  centuries,  but  there  is 
to-day  no  Russian  people.  What  makes  a  people? 
Not  a  land  certainly.  Not  political  forms  nor 
political  sovereignty.  Not  even  political  indepen- 
dence. Nor,  for  that  matter,  voices  that  pretend 
or  aspire  to  speak  the  thoughts  of  a  nation. 
Poland  has  had  such  voices  and  Russia  has  had 
her  artists,  musicians,  novelists,  poets. 

The  thing  that  makes  a  people  is  a  thing  over 
which  statesmen  have  no  control.  Geography 
throws  no  light  on  the  subject.  Nor  does  that 
study  of  the  races  of  man  which  is  called  anthro- 
pology. It  is  not  a  psychological  secret  (psychol- 
ogy covers  a  multitude  of  guesses).  Philosophy 
may  evolve  beautiful  systems  of  thought,  but  sys- 
tems of  thought  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  par- 
ticular puzzle  before  us. 

The  secret  must  be  sought  elsewhere.  Is  it  an 
inherited  thing,  this  thing  that  makes  a  people? 
That  can't  be;  ours  is  a  mixed  inheritance  here  in 
America.  Is  it  an  abstract  idea?  Abstract  ideas 
are  never  more  than  architectural  pencillings  and 
seldom  harden  into  concrete  foundations.  Is  it  a 
common  emotion?  If  it  were  we  should  be  able 
to  agree  on  a  name  for  it.  Is  it  an  instinct?  An 
instinct  might  be  back  of  it. 

What  is  left?     Can  it  be  a  religion?     As  such 


28  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

it  should  be  easily  recognizable.     But  an  element 
of  religion?     An  act  of  faith? 

Yes,  for  faith  may  exist  with  or  without  a  creed, 
and  the  act  of  faith  may  be  deliberate  or  involun- 
tar3^  Willed  or  unwilled  the  faith  is  held ;  formu- 
lated or  unformulated  the  essential  creed  is  there. 
Let  us  look  at  the  people  of  America,  men  and 
women  of  very  divergent  types  and  tempers  far 
apart;  men  and  women  of  inextricable  heredities 
and  of  confusing  beliefs — even,  ordinarily,  of 
clashing  purposes.  Each  believes  a  set  of  things, 
but  the  beliefs  of  them  all  can  be  reduced  to  a  low- 
est common  denominator,  a  belief  in  each  other;  just 
as  the  beliefs  of  them  all  have  a  highest  common 
multiple,  a  willingness  to  die  in  defence  of  America. 
To  some  of  them  America  means  a  past,  to  some 
the  past  has  no  meaning;  to  some  of  them  America 
means  a  future,  to  others  a  future  is  without  sig- 
nificance. But  to  all  of  them  America  means  a 
present  to  be  safeguarded  at  the  cost  of  their  lives, 
if  need  be;  and  the  fact  that  the  present  is  the 
translation  of  the  past  to  some  and  the  reading  of 
the  future  to  others  is  incidental. 


We  would  apply  these  considerations  to  the  affair 
of  literature ;  and  having  been  tiresomely  generaliz- 


A  Barbaric  Yawp  29 

ing  we  shall  get  down  to  cases  that  every  one  can 
understand. 

The  point  we  have  tried  to  make  condenses  to 
this:  The  present  is  supremely  important  to  us  all. 
To  some  of  us  it  is  all  important  because  of  the 
past,  and  to  some  of  us  it  is  of  immense  moment 
because  of  the  future,  and  to  the  greatest  number 
(probably)  the  present  is  of  overshadowing  con- 
cern because  it  is  the  present — the  time  when  they 
count  and  make  themselves  count.  It  is  now  or 
never,  as  it  always  is  in  life,  though  the  urgency 
of  the  hour  is  not  always  so  apparent. 

It  was  now  or  never  with  the  armies  in  the  field, 
with  the  men  training  in  the  camps,  with  the  coal 
miners,  the  shipbuilders,  the  food  savers  in  the 
kitchens.  It  is  just  as  much  now  or  never  with  the 
poets,  the  novelists,  the  essayists — with  the  workers 
in  every  line,  although  they  may  not  see  so  dis- 
tinctly the  immediacy  of  the  hour.  Everybody 
saw  the  necessity  of  doing  things  to  win  the  war; 
many  can  see  the  necessity  of  doing  things  that 
will  constitute  a  sort  of  winning  after  the  war. 
There  is  always  something  to  be  won.  If  it  is  not 
a  war  it  is  an  after  the  war.  "Peace  hath  its  vic- 
tories no  less  renowned  than  war"  is  a  fine  sound- 
ing line  customarily  recited  without  the  slightest 
recognition  of  its  real  meaning.  The  poet  did 
not  mean  that  the  victories  of  peace  were  as  greatly 
acclaimed  as  the  victories  of  war,  but  that  the  sum 


30  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

total  of  their  renown  was  as  great  or  greater  be- 
cause they  are  more  enduring. 


Now  for  the  cases. 

It  is  the  duty,  the  opportunity  and  the  privilege 
of  America  now,  in  the  present  hour,  to  make  it 
impossible  hereafter  for  any  one  to  raise  such  a 
question  as  Bliss  Perry  brings  up  in  his  book  The 
American  Spirit  in  Literature,  namely,  whether 
there  is  an  independent  American  literature.  Not 
only  does  Mr.  Perry  raise  the  question,  but,  stated 
as  baldly  as  we  have  stated  it,  the  query  was  there- 
upon discussed,  with  great  seriousness,  by  a  well- 
known  American  book  review !  We  are  happy 
to  say  that  both  Mr.  Perry  and  the  book  re- 
view decided  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  an 
American  literature,  and  that  American  writing  is 
not  a  mere  adjunct  (perhaps  a  caudal  appendage) 
of  English  literature.  All  Americans  will  feel 
deeply  gratified  that  they  could  honorably  come  to 
such  a  conclusion.  But  not  all  Americans  will  feel 
gratified  that  the  conclusion  was  reached  on  the 
strength  of  Emerson,  Lowell,  Longfellow,  Whit- 
tier,  Holmes,  Whitman,  Poe  and  others  of  the  im- 
mortal dead.  Some  Americans  will  wish  with  a 
faint  and  timid  longing  that  the  conclusion  might 
have  been  reached,  or  at  least  sustained,   on  the 


A  Barbaric  Yawp 


strength  of  Tarkington,  Robert  Herrick,  Edith 
Wharton,  Mary  Johnston,  Gertrude  Atherton, 
Mary  S.  Watts,  William  Allen  White,  Edgar  Lee 
Masters,  Amy  Lowell,  Edna  Ferber,  Joseph 
Hergesheimer,  Owen  Wister  and  a  dozen  or  so 
other  living  writers  over  whose  relative  importance 
as  witnesses  for  the  affirmative  we  have  no  desire 
to  quarrel.  Mr.  Howells,  we  believe,  was  called 
to  the  stand. 

If  we  had  not  seen  it  we  should  refuse  to  credit 
our  senses.  The  idea  of  any  one  holding  court  to- 
day to  decide  the  question  as  to  the  existence  of  an 
independent  American  literature  is  incredibly 
funny.  It  is  the  peculiarity  of  criticism  that  any 
one  can  set  up  a  court  anywhere  at  any  time  for 
any  purpose  and  with  unlimited  jurisdiction. 
There  are  no  rules  of  procedure.  There  are  no 
rules  of  evidence.  There  is  no  jury;  the  people 
who  read  books  may  sit  packed  in  the  court  room, 
but  there  must  be  no  interruptions.  Order  in  the 
court!  Usually  the  critic  judge  sits  alone,  but 
sometimes  there  are  special  sessions  with  a  full 
bench.  Writs  are  issued,  subpoenas  served,  wit- 
nesses are  called  and  testimony  is  taken.  An  in- 
junction may  be  applied  for,  either  temporary  or 
permanent.  Nothing  is  easier  than  to  be  held  in 
contempt. 


2^2.  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


The  most  striking  pecuHarity  of  procedure  in  the 
Critical  Court  is  with  regard  to  what  constitutes 
evidence.  You  might,  in  the  innocence  of  your 
heart,  suppose  that  a  man's  writings  would  consti- 
tute the  only  admissible  evidence.  Not  at  all.  His 
writings  have  really  nothing  to  do  with  the  case. 
What  is  his  Purpose?  If,  as  a  sincere  individual, 
he  has  anywhere  exposed  or  stated  his  object  in 
writing  books  counsel  objects  to  the  admission  of 
this  Purpose  as  evidence  on  the  ground  that  it  is 
incompetent,  irrelevant  and  immaterial;  and  not 
sound  Art.  On  the  other  hand  if,  as  an  artist,  he 
has  embodied  his  Purpose  in  his  fiction  so  that 
every  intelligent  reader  may  discover  it  for  himself 
and  feel  the  glow  of  a  personal  discovery,  counsel 
will  object  to  the  admission  of  his  books  as  evi- 
dence on  the  ground  that  they  are  incompetent,  ir- 
relevant and  immaterial;  and  not  the  best  proof. 
Counsel  will  demand  that  the  man  himself  be  ex- 
amined personally  as  to  his  purpose  (if  he  is  alive) 
or  will  demand  a  searching  examination  of  his 
private  life  (if  he  be  dead).  The  witness  is 
always  a  culprit  and  browbeating  the  witness  is 
always  in  order.  I  am  a  highbrow  and  you  are  a 
lowbrow;  what  the  devil  do  you  mean  by  writing 
a  book  anyway? 

Before  the  trial  begins  the  critic-judge  enunciates 


A  Barbaric  Yawp  33 

certain  principles  on  which  the  verdict  will  be  based 
and  the  verdict  is  based  on  those  principles  whether 
they  find  any  application  in  the  testimony  or  not.  A 
favorite  principle  with  the  man  on  the  bench  is  that 
all  that  is  not  obscure  is  not  Art.  It  isn't  phrased  as 
intelligibly  as  that,  to  be  sure;  a  common  way  to  put 
it  is  to  lay  down  the  rule  that  the  popularity  of  a 
book  (which  means  the  extent  to  which  it  is  under- 
stood and  therefore  appreciated)  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  case,  tra-la,  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
case.  Another  principle  is  that  sound  can  be 
greater  than  sense,  which,  in  the  lingo  of  the  High- 
est Criticism,  is  the  dictum  that  words  and  sen- 
tences can  have  a  beauty  apart  from  the  meaning 
(if  any)  that  they  seek  to  convey.  And  there 
really  is  something  in  this  idea;  for  example,  what 
could  be  lovelier  than  the  old  line,  "Eeny,  meeny, 
miny-mo"  ?  Shakespeare,  a  commercial  fellow 
who  wrote  plays  for  a  living,  knew  this  when  he 
let  one  of  his  characters  sing: 

"When  that  I  was  and  a  little  tiny  boy, 
With  hey,  ho,  the  wind  and  the  rain, 
A  foolish  thing  was  but  a  toy, 

For  the  rain  it  raineth  every  day." 

And  a  little  earlier  in  Twelfth  Night: 

"Like  a  mad  lad. 
Pare  thy  nails,  dad; 
Adieu,  goodman  devil." 


34  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Which  is  not  only  beautiful  as  sound,  but  without 
the  least  sense  unless  it  hath  the  vulgarity  to  be 
looked  for  in  the  work  of  a  mercenary  playwright. 


But  the  strangest  thing  about  the  proceedings  in 
the  Critical  Court  is  their  lack  of  contemporary  in- 
terest. Rarely,  indeed,  is  anything  decided  here 
until  it  has  been  decided  everywhere  else.  For  the 
great  decisions  are  the  decisions  of  life  and  not  de- 
cisions on  the  past.  A  man  has  written  twenty 
books  and  he  is  dead.  He  is  ripe  for  consideration 
by  the  Critical  Court.  A  man  has  written  two 
novels  and  has  eighteen  more  ahead  of  him.  The 
Critical  Court  will  leave  him  alone  until  he  is  past 
all  helping.  It  seems  never  to  occur  to  the  critic- 
judge  that  a  young  man  who  has  written  two 
novels  is  more  important  than  a  dead  man  who  has 
written  twenty  novels.  For  the  young  man  who 
has  written  two  novels  has  some  novels  yet  to  be 
written ;  he  can  be  helped,  strengthened,  encour- 
aged, advised,  corrected,  warned,  counselled,  re- 
buked, praised,  blamed,  presented  with  bills  of  par- 
ticulars, and — heartened.  If  he  has  not  genius 
nothing  can  put  it  in  him,  but  if  he  has,  many 
things  can  be  done  to  help  him  exploit  it.  And 
a  man  who  is  dead  cannot  be  affected  by  anything 
you  say  or  do;  the  critic-judge  has  lost  his  chance 


A  Barbaric  Yawp  35 

of  shaping  that  writer's  work  and  can  no  longer 
write  a  decree,  only  an  epitaph. 

To  be  brutally  frank :  Nobody  cares  what  the 
Critical  Court  thinks  of  Whitman  or  Poe  or  Long- 
fellow or  Hawthorne.  Everybody  cares  what 
Tarkington  does  next,  what  Mary  Johnston  tackles, 
what  the  developments  are  in  the  William  Allen 
White  case,  what  becomes  of  Joseph  Hergesheimer, 
whether  Amy  Lowell  achieves  great  work  in  that 
contrapuntal  poetry  she  calls  polyphonic  prose. 
On  these  things  depend  the  present  era  in  American 
literature  and  the  possibilities  of  the  future.  And 
these  things  are  more  or  less  under  our  control. 

The  people  of  America  not  only  believe  that 
there  is  an  independent  American  literature,  but 
they  believe  that  there  will  continue  to  be.  Some 
of  them  believe  in  the  past  of  that  literature,  some 
of  them  believe  in  its  future;  but  all  of  them  be- 
lieve in  its  present  and  its  presence.  Their  voice 
may  be  stifled  in  the  Critical  Court  (silence  in  the 
court!)  but  it  is  audible  everywhere  else.  It  is 
heard  in  the  bookshops  where  piles  of  new  fiction 
melt  away,  where  new  verse  is  in  brisk  demand, 
where  new  biographies  and  historical  works  are 
bought  daily  and  where  books  on  all  sorts  of 
weighty  subjects  flake  down  from  the  shelves  into 
the  hands  of  customers. 

The  voice  of  the  American  people  is  articulate  in 
the  offices  of  newspapers  which  deal  with  the  news 


36  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

of  new  books.  It  makes  a  seismographic  record 
in  the  ledgers  of  publishing  houses.  It  comes  to 
almost  every  writer  in  letters  of  inquiry,  comment 
and  commendation.  What,  do  you  suppose,  a 
writer  like  Gene  Stratton-Porter  cares  whether  the 
Critical  Court  excludes  her  work  or  condemns  it? 
She  can  reread  hundreds  and  thousands  of  letters 
from  men  and  women  who  tell  her  how  profoundly 
her  books  have — tickled  their  fancy?  pleased  their 
love  of  verbal  beauty?  taxed  their  intellectuals  to 
understand?  No,  merely  how  profoundly  her 
books  have  altered  their  whole  lives. 

Hear  ye!  Hear  ye!  Hear  ye!  The  Critical 
Court  is  in  session.  All  who  have  business  with 
the  court  draw  near  and  give  attention! 


IN  THE   CRITICAL  COURT 


Ill 


IN  THE  CRITICAL  COURT 


^TIHE  Critical  Court  being  in  session,  William 

A       Dean    Howells,    H.    W.    Boynton,    W.    C. 

Brownell,    Wilson    Follctt    and    William    Marion 

Reedy    sitting,    the    case    of    Booth    Tarkington, 

novelist,  is  called. 

Counsel  for  the  Prosecution  :  If  it  please  the 
court,  this  case  should  go  over.  The  defendant, 
Mr.  Tarkington,  is  not  dead  yet. 

Mr.  Howells  :  I  do  not  know  how  my  colleagues 
feel,  but  I  have  no  objection  to  considering  the 
work  of  Mr.  Tarkington  while  he  is  alive. 

Mr.  Follett:  I  think  it  would  be  better  if  we 
deferred  the  consideration  of  Mr.  Tarkington  until 
it  is  a  little  older. 

Counsel  for  the  Defense  {in  this  case  Mr. 
Robert  Cortes  Holliday,  biographer  of  Tarking- 
ton) :  "It"? 

Mr.  Follett  :  I  mean  his  work,  or  works.  Per- 
haps I  should  have  said  "them." 

Mr.  Holliday:  "They,"  not  "them."  Excep- 
tion.    And   "are"   instead  of  "is."     Gentlemen,   I 

39 


40  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

have  no  wish  to  prejudice  the  case  for  my  client, 
but  I  must  point  out  that  if  you  wait  until  he  is  a 
little  older  he  may  be  dead. 

Mr.  BoYNTON :  So  much  the  better.  We  can 
then  consider  his  works  in  their  complete  state  and 
with  reference  to  his  entire  life. 

Mr.  HoLLiDAY :  But  it  would  then  be  impossible 
to  give   any   assistance  to   Mr.   Tarkington.     The 
chance  to  influence  his  work  would  have  passed. 
Mr.  Brownell:  That  is  relatively  unimportant. 
Mr.  HoLLiDAY :  I  beg  pardon  but  Mr.  Tarking- 
ton feels  it  rather  important  to  him. 

Mr.  BoYNTON :  My  dear  Mr.  Holliday,  you  really 
must  remember  that  it  is  not  what  seems  impor- 
tant to  Mr.  Tarkington  that  can  count  with  us, 
but  what  is  important  in  our  eyes. 
Mr.  Holliday:  Self-importance. 
Mr.  BoYNTON  (stiMy)  :  Certainly  not.  Merely 
self-confidence.  But  on  my  own  behalf  I  may  say 
this :  I  am  unwilling  to  consider  Mr.  Tarkington's 
works  in  this  place  at  this  time;  but  I  am  willing 
to  pass  judgment  in  an  article  for  a  newspaper  or 
a  monthly  magazine  or  some  other  purely  perish- 
able medium.  That  should  be  sufficient  for  Mr. 
Tarkington. 

Mr.  FoLLETT :  I  think  the  possibility  of  consider- 
ing Mr.  Tarkington  must  be  ruled  out,  anyway,  as 
one  or  more  of  his  so-called  works  have  first  ap- 
peared serially  in  the  Saturday  Evening  Post. 


In  the  Critical  Court  41 

Mr.  HoLLiDAY  (noting  the  effect  of  this  reveUi- 
tion  on  the  members  of  the  court)  :  Very  well,  I 
will  not  insist.  Booth,  you  will  have  to  get  along 
the  best  you  can  with  newspaper  and  magazine  re- 
views and  with  what  people  write  to  you  or  tell  you 
face  to  face.  Be  brave,  Tark,  and  do  as  you  aren't 
done  by.  After  all,  a  few  million  people  read  you  and 
you  make  enough  to  live  on.  The  court  will  pass 
on  you  after  you  are  dead,  and  if  you  dictate  any 
books  on  the  ouija  board  the  court's  verdict  may 
be  helpful  to  you  then ;  you  might  even  manage  the 
later  Henry  James  manner. 

Clerk  of  the  Court  (Prof.  William  Lyon 
Phelps):  Next  easel  Mrs.  Atherton  please  step 
forward ! 

Mrs.  Atherton  (advancing  with  composure)  :  I 
can  find  no  one  to  act  for  me,  so  I  will  be  my  own 
counsel.  I  will  say  at  the  outset  that  I  do  not  care 
for  the  court,  individually  or  collectively,  nor  for 
its  verdict,  whatever  it  may  be. 

Prof.  Phelps:  I  must  warn  you  that  anything 
you  say  may,  and  probably  will,  be  used  against 
you. 

Mrs.  Atherton  :  Oh,  I  don't  mind  that ;  it's  the 
things  the  members  of  the  court  have  said  against 
me  that  I  purpose  to  use  against  them. 

Mr.  Brownell:  Are  you,  by  any  chance,  refer- 
ring to  me,  Madam? 

Mrs.  Atherton  :  I  do  not  refer  to  persons,  Mr. 


42  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Brownell.  I  hit  them.  No,  I  had  Mr.  Boynton 
particularly  in  mind.  And  perhaps  Gene  Stratton- 
Porter.  Is  she  here?  {Looks  around  menac- 
ingly).    No.     Well,  go  ahead  with  your  nonsense. 

Mr.  Ho  WELLS  (rising)  :  I  think  I  will  withdraw 
from  consideration  of  this  case.  Mrs.  Atherton 
has  challenged  me  so  often 

Mr.  Boynton  :  No,  stay.  /  am  going  to  stick 
it  out 

Mr.  FoLLETT :  I  think  there  is  no  question  but 
that  we  should  hold  the  defendant  in  contempt. 

Mrs.  Atherton  :  Mutual,  I  assure  you.  (She 
sweeps  out  of  the  room  and  a  large  section  of  the 
public  quietly  follows  her.) 

Clerk  Phelps  :  Joseph  Hergesheimer  to  the 
bar!  (A  short,  stocky  fellow  with  twinkling  eyes 
steps  forward.)     Mr.  Hergesheimer? 

Mr.  Hergesheimer:  Right. 

Mr.  Reedy  :  Good  boy,  Joe ! 

Mr.  FoLLETT :  It  won't  do,  it  won't  do  at  all. 
There's  only  The  Three  Black  Pennys  and  Gold  and 
Iron  and  a  novel  called  Java  Head  to  go  by.  Sat- 
urday Evening  Post.  And  bewilderingly  unlike 
each  other.  Seem  artistic  but  are  too  popular,  I 
fancy,  really  to  be  sound. 

Mr.  Hergesheimer:  With  all  respect,  I  should 
like  to  ask  whether  this  is  a  court  of  record  ? 

Mr.  HowELLs:  It  is. 

Mr.  Hergesheimer:  In  that  case  I  think  I  shall 


In  the  Critical  Court  43 

press  for  a  verdict  which  may  be  very  helpful  to 
me.  I  should  like  also  to  have  the  members  of  the 
court  on  record  respecting  my  work. 

Mr.  BoYNTON :  Just  as  I  feared.  My  dear  fel- 
low, while  we  should  like  to  be  helpful  and  will 
endeavor  to  give  you  advice  tO'  that  end  it  must 
be  done  unobtrusively  .  .  .  current  reviews  .  .  . 
we'll  compare  your  work  with  that  of  Hawthorne 
and  Hardy  or  perhaps  a  standard  Frenchman. 
That  will  give  you  something  to  work  for.  But 
you  cannot  expect  us  to  say  anything  definite  about 
you  at  this  stage  of  your  work.  Suppose  we  were 
to  say  what  we  really  think,  or  what  some  really 
think,  that  you  are  the  most  promising  writer  in 
America  to-day,  promising  in  the  sense  that  you 
have  most  of  your  work  before  you  and  in  the 
sense  that  your  work  is  both  popular  and  artistically 
fine.     Don't  you  see  the  risk? 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  :  I  do,  and  I  also  see  that 
you  would  make  your  own  reputation  much  more 
than  you  would  make  mine.  I  write  a  story.  I 
risk  everything  with  that  story.  You  deliver  a 
verdict.  Why  shouldn't  you  take  a  decent  chance, 
too? 

Mr.  Follett:  Why  should  I  take  any  more 
chances  than  I  have  to  with  my  contemporaries  ?  I 
pick  them  pretty  carefully,  I  can  tell  you. 

Mr.  Hergesheimer  :  I  shall  write  a  novel  to  be 
published    after    my    death.     There    was    Henry 


44  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Adams.  He  stipulated  that  The  Education  of 
Henry  Adams  should  not  be  published  until  after 
his  death;  and  everybody  says  it  is  positively  bril- 
liant. 

Mr.  FoLLETT  (relieved) :  That  is  a  wise  decision. 
But  don't  be  disheartened.  I'll  probably  be  able  to 
get  around  to  you  in  ten  years,  anyway.  (Mr. 
Hergesheimer  hows  and  retires.) 

Clerk  Phelps  :  John  Galsworthy ! 

Mr.  FoLLETT  (brightening)  :  Some  of  the  Eng- 
lishmen! This  is  better!  Besides,  I  know  all  about 
Galsworthy. 

Mr.  Galsworthy  (coming  forward) :  I  feel 
much  honored. 

Counsel  for  the  Prosecution  :  If  the  court 
please,  I  must  state  that  for  some  time  now  Mr. 
Galsworthy  has  been  published  serially  in  a  maga- 
zine with  a  circulation  of  one  digit  and  six  ciphers. 
Or  one  cipher  and  six  digits,  I  cannot  remember 
which. 

Mr.  Brownell:  What,  six?  Then  he  has  more 
readers  than  can  be  counted  on  the  fingers  of  one 
hand.  There  are  only  five  fingers  on  a  hand.  I 
think  this  is  conclusive, 

Mr.  Boynton  :  Oh,  decidedly. 

Mr.  Follett  :  But  I  put  him  in  my  book  on  mod- 
ern novelists,  all  of  whom  were  hand  picked. 

Mr.  Galsworthy  (with  much  calmness  for  one 
uttering  a  terrible  heresy)  :  Perhaps  that's  the  diffi- 


In  the  Critical  Court  45 

culty,  really.  All  hand  picked.  Do  you  know,  I 
rather  believe  in  literary  windfalls.  But  I  beg  to 
withdraw.     (And  he  does.) 

The  Clerk  :  Herbert  George  Wells ! 

Mr.  Wells  {sauntering  up  and  speaking  imth  a 
certain  inattention)  :  Respecting  my  long  novel, 
Joan  and  Peter,  there  are  some  points  that  need  to 
be  made  clear.  Peter,  you  know,  is  called  Petah 
by  Joan.  Petah  is  a  sapient  fellow.  He  is  even 
able  to  admire  the  Germans  because,  after  all,  they 
knew  where  they  were  going,  they  knew  what  they 
were  after,  their  education  had  them  headed  for 
something.  It  had,  indeed.  I  think  Petah  over- 
looks the  fact  that  it  had  headed  them  for  Paris 
in  1914. 

The  point  that  Oswald  and  I  make  in  the  book  is 
that  England  and  the  Empire,  in  1914  and  prior 
thereto,  had  not  been  headed  for  anything,  educa- 
tionally or  otherwise,  except  Littleness  in  every 
field  of  political  endeavor,  except  Stupidity  in  every 
province  of  human  affairs.  And  the  proof  of  this, 
we  argue,  is  found  in  the  first  three  years  of  the 
Great  War.  No  doubt.  The  first  three  years  of 
the  war  prove  so  many  things  that  this  may  well  be 
among  them;  don't  you  think  so? 

Without  detracting  from  the  damning  case  which 
Oswald  and  I  make  out  against  England  it  does 
occur  to  me,  as  I  poke  over  my  material  for  a  new 
book,  that  as  the  proof  of  a  pudding  is  in  the  eat- 


46  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ing  so  the  proof  of  a  nation  at  war  is  in  the  fighting. 
Indisputable  as  the  bankruptcy  of  much  British 
leadership  has  been,  indisputable  as  it  is  that  Gen- 
eral Gough  lost  tens  of  thousands  of  prisoners,  hun- 
dreds of  guns  and  vast  stores  of  ammunition,  it  is 
equally  indisputable  that  the  Australians  who  died 
like  flies  at  the  Dardanelles  died  like  men,  that  the 
Tommies  who  were  shot  by  their  own  guns  at 
Neuve  Chapelle  went  forward  like  heroes,  that  the 
undersized  and  undernourished  and  unintellectual 
Londoners  from  Whitechapel  who  fell  in  Flanders 
gave  up  their  immortal  souls  like  freemen  and  Eng- 
lishmen and  kinsmen  of  the  Lion  Heart. 

And  if  it  comes  to^  a  question  as  to  the  blame  for 
the  war  as  distinguished  from  the  question  as  to 
the  blame  for  the  British  conduct  of  the  war,  the 
latter  being  that  with  which  Joan  and  Peter  is  al- 
most wholly  concerned,  I  should  like  to  point  out 
now,  on  behalf  of  myself  and  the  readers  of  my 
next  book,  that  perhaps  I  am  not  entirely  blameless. 
Perhaps  I  bear  an  infinitesimal  portion  of  the  ter- 
rible responsibility  which  I  have  showed  some  un- 
willingness to  place  entirely  and  clearly  on  Ger- 
many. 

For  after  all,  it  was  Science  that  made  the  war 
and  that  waged  it;  it  was  the  idolatry  of  Science  that 
had  transformed  the  German  nation  ~by  transform- 
ing the  German  nature.  It  was  the  proofs  of  what 
Science  could   do  that  convinced   Prussia  of  her 


In  the  Critical  Court  47 

power,  that  made  her  confident  that  with  this  new 
weapon  she  could  overstride  the  earth.  I  had  a 
part  in  setting  up  that  worship  of  Science.  I  have 
been  not  only  one  of  its  prophets  but  a  high  priest 
in  its  temple. 

And  I  am  all  the  more  dismayed,  therefore,  when 
I  find  myself,  as  in  Joan  and  Peter,  still  kneeling  at 
the  shrine.  What  is  the  cure  for  war?  I  ask. 
Petah  tells  us  that  our  energies  must  have  some 
other  outlet.  We  must  explore  the  poles  and  dig 
through  the  earth  to  China.  He  himself  will  go 
back  to  Cambridge  and  get  a  medical  degree;  and 
if  he  is  good  enough  he'll  do  something  on  the 
border  line  between  biology  and  chemistry.  Joan 
will  build  model  houses.  And  the  really  curious 
thing  is  that  the  pair  of  them  seem  disposed  to  run 
the  unspeakable  risks  of  trying  to  educate  still  an- 
other generation,  a  generation  which,  should  it  have 
to  fight  a  war  with  a  conquering  horde  from  Mars, 
might  blame  Peter  and  Joan  severely  for  the  sacri- 
fices involved,  just  as  they  blame  the  old  Victorians 
for  the  sacrifice  of  1914-1918. 

Mr.  HowELLs:  In  heaven's  name,  what  is  this 
tirade? 

Mr.  Brownell  :  Mr.  Wells  is  merely  writing  his 
next  book,  that's  all. 

{As  it  is  impossible  to  stop  Mr.  Wells  the  court 
adjourns  without  a  day.) 


BOOK  ^'REVIEWING 


IV 

BOOK  "reviewing" 

ON  the  subject  of  Book  "Reviewing"  we  feel 
we  can  speak  freely,  knowing  all  about  the 
business,  as  we  do,  though  by  no  means  a  practi- 
tioner, and  having  no  convictions  on  the  score  of 
it.  For  we  point  with  pride  to  the  fact  that,  though 
many  times  indicted,  a  conviction  has  never  been 
secured  against  us.  However,  it  isn't  considered 
good  form  (whatever  that  is)  to  talk  about  your 
own  crimes.  For  instance,  after  exhausting  the 
weather,  you  should  say  pleasantly  to  your  neigh- 
bor :  "What  an  interesting  burglary  you  committed 
last  night!  We  were  all  quite  stirred  up!"  It  is 
almost  improper  (much  worse  than  merely  im- 
moral) to  exhibit  your  natural  egoism  by  remark- 
ing: "If  I  do  say  it,  that  murder  I  did  on  Tuesday 
was  a  particularly  good  job !" 

For  this  reason,  if  for  no  other,  we  would  re- 
frain, ordinarily,  from  talking  about  book  "review- 
ing"; but  since  Robert  Cortes  Holliday  has  men- 
tioned the  subject  in  his  Walking-Stick  Papers  and 
thus  introduced  the  indelicate  topic  once  and  for 
all,  there  really  seems  no  course  open  but  to  pick 

51 


52  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

up  the  theme  and  treat  it  in  a  serious,  thoughtful 
way. 


Book  reviewing  is  so  called  because  the  books  are 
not  reviewed,  or  viewed  (some  say  not  even  read). 
They  are  described  with  more  or  less  accuracy  and 
at  a  variable  length.  They  are  praised,  condemned, 
weighed  and  solved  by  the  use  of  logarithms. 
They  are  read,  digested,  quoted  and  tested  for  but- 
ter fat.  They  are  examined,  evalued,  enjoyed  and 
assessed ;  criticised,  and  frequently  found  fault  with 
(not  the  same  thing,  of  course)  ;  chronicled  and 
even  orchestrated  by  the  few  who  never  write 
words  without  writing  both  words  and  music. 
James  Huneker  could  make  Irvin  Cobb  sound  like 
a  performance  by  the  Boston  Symphony.  Others, 
like  Benjamin  De  Casseres,  have  a  dramatic  gift. 
Mr.  De  Casseres  writes  book  revues. 


Any  one  can  review  a  book  and  every  one  should 
be  encouraged  to  do  it.  It  is  unskilled  labor. 
Good  book  reviewers  earn  from  $150  to  $230  a 
week,  working  only  in  their  spare  time,  like  the 
good-looking  young  men  and  women  who  sell  the 
Saturday  Evening  Post,  the  Ladies'  Home  Journal 
and  the  Country  Gentleman  but  who  seldom  earn 


Book  "Reviewing"  53 

over  $100  a  week.  Book  reviewing  is  one  of  the 
very  few  subjects  not  taught  by  the  correspondence 
schools,  simply  because  there  is  nothing  to  teach. 
It  is  so  simple  a  child  can  operate  it  with  perfect 
safety.  Write  for  circular  giving  full  particulars 
and  our  handy  phrasebook  listing  2,567  standard 
phrases  indispensable  to  any  reviewer — FREE. 

In  reviewing  a  book  there  is  no  method  to  be 
followed.  Like  one  of  the  playerpianos,  you  shut 
the  doors  (i.e.,  close  the  covers)  and  play  (or 
write)  hy  instinct!  Although  no  directions  are 
necessary  we  will  suggest  a  few  things  to  overcome 
the  beginner's  utterly  irrational  sense  of  helpless- 
ness. 

One  of  the  most  useful  comments  in  dealing  with 
very  scholarly  volumes,  such  as  A  History  of  the 
Statistical  Process  in  Modern  Philanthropical  En- 
terprises by  Jacob  Jones,  is  as  follows :  "Mr.  Jones's 
work  shows  signs  of  haste."  The  peculiar  advan- 
tage of  this  is  that  you  do  not  libel  Mr.  Jones ;  the 
haste  may  have  been  the  printer's  or  the  publisher's 
or  almost  anybody's  but  the  postoffice's.  In  the 
case  of  a  piece  of  light  fiction  the  best  way  to  start 
your  review  is  by  saying :  "A  new  book  from  the 
pen  of  Alice  Apostrophe  is  always  welcome."  But 
suppose  the  book  is  a  first  book  ?  One  of  the  finest 
opening  sentences  for  the  review  of  a  first  book 
runs:  "For  a  first  novel,  George  Lamplit's  Good 
Graciotis!  is  a  tale  of  distinct  promise."     Be  care- 


54  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ful  to  say  "distinct";  it  is  an  adjective  that  fits 
perfectly  over  the  shoulders  of  any  average-chested 
noun.  It  gives  the  noun  that  upright,  swagger 
carriage  a  careful  writer  likes  his  nouns  to  have. 


But  clothes  do  not  make  the  man  and  words  do 
not  make  the  book  review.  A  book  review  must 
have  a  Structure,  a  Skeleton,  if  it  be  no  more  than 
the  skeleton  in  the  book  closet.  It  must  have  a 
backbone  and  a  bite.  It  must  be  able  to  stand 
erect  and  look  the  author  in  the  face  and  tell  him 
to  go  to  the  Home  for  Indigent  Authors  which  the 
Authors'  League  will  build  one  of  these  days  after 
it  has  met  running  expenses. 

Our  favorite  book  reviewer  reviews  the  ordinary 
book  in  four  lines  and  a  semi-colon.  Unusual 
books  drain  his  vital  energy  to  the  extent  of  a 
paragraph  and  a  half,  three  adjectives  to  the  square 
inch. 

He  makes  it  a  point  to  have  one  commendatory 
phrase  and  one  derogatory  phrase,  which  gives  a 
nicely  balanced,  "on  the  one  hand  ...  on  the 
other  hand"  effect.  He  says  that  the  book  is  at- 
tractively bound  but  badly  printed ;  well-written  but 
deficient  in  emotional  intensity;  full  of  action  but 
weak  in  characterization;  has  a  good  plot  but  is 
devoid  of  style. 


Book  "Reviewing"  55 

He  reads  all  the  books  he  reviews.     Every  little 
while  he  pounces  upon  a  misquotation  on  page  438, 
or  a  misprint  on  page  279.     Reviewers  who  do  not 
read  the  books  they  review  may  chance  upon  such 
details  while  idly  turning  the  uncut  leaves  or  while 
looking  at  the  back  cover,  but  they  never  bring  in 
three  runs  on  the  other  side's  error.     They  spot  the 
fact  that  the  heroine's  mother,  who  was  killed  in 
a  train  accident  in  the  fourth  chapter,  buys  a  re- 
frigerator  in   the   twenty-third   chapter,   and   they 
indulge  in  an  unpardonable  witticism  as  to  the  hero- 
ine's mother's  whereabouts  after  her  demise.     But 
the  wrong  accent  on  the  Greek  word  in  Chapter 
XVII  gets  by  them;  and  as  for  the  psychological 
impulse  which  led  the  herO'  to  jump  from  Brooklyn 
Bridge  on  the  Fourth  of  July  they  miss  it  entirely 
and  betray  their  neglect  of  their  duty  by  alluding 
to  him  as  a  poor  devil  crazed  with  the  heat.     The 
fact  is,  of  course,  that  he  did  a  Steve  Brodie  be- 
cause he  found  something  obscurely  hateful  in  the 
Manhattan  skyline.     Day  after  day,  while  walking 
to  his  work  on  the  Brooklyn  Rapid   Transit,  he 
gazed  at  the  saw-toothed  outline  of  the  buildings 
limned  against  the  sky.     Day  by  day  his  soul  kept 
asking:  "Why  don't  they  get  a  gold  filling  for  that 
cavity  between  the  Singer  and  Woolworth  towers  ?" 
And  he  would  ask  himself  despondently:  "Is  this 
what  I  live  for?"     And  gradually  he  felt  that  it 
was  not.     He  felt  that  it  might  be  something  to 


56  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

die  about,  however.  And  so,  with  the  rashness  of 
youth,  he  leaped.  The  George  Meredith-Thomas 
Hardy  irony  came  into  the  story  when  he  was 
pulled  out  of  the  river  by  his  rival  in  Dorinda's 
affections,  Gregory  Anthracyte,  owner  of  the  mag- 
nificent steam  yacht  Chuggermugger. 

So  much  for  the  anatomy  of  a  book  review.  Put 
backbone  into  it.  Read  before  you  write.  Look 
before  you  leap.  Be  just,  be  fair,  be  impartial; 
and  when  you  damn,  damn  with  faint  praise,  and 
when  you  praise,  praise  with  faint  damns.  Be  all 
things  to  all  books.  Remember  the  author.  Re- 
view as  you  would  be  reviewed  by.  If  a  book  is 
nothing  in  your  life  it  may  be  the  fault  of  your 
life.  And  it  is  always  less  expensive  to  revise  your 
life  than  to  revise  the  book.  Your  life  is  not 
printed  from  plates  that  cost  a  fortune  to  make 
and  another  fortune  to  throw  away.  "Life  is  too 
short  to  read  inferior  books,"  eh?  Books  are  too 
good  to  be  guillotined  by  inferior  lives — or  inferior 
livers.  Bacon  said  some  books  were  to  be  digested, 
but  he  neglected  to  mention  a  cure  for  dyspeptics. 


But  when  we  say  so  much  we  have  only  touched 
the  surface  of  a  profound  matter.  The  truth  of 
that  matter,  the  full  depth  of  it,  may  as  well  be 
plumbed  at  once.     A  book  cannot  be  reviewed.     It 


Book  "Reviewing"  57 

can  only  be  written  about  or  around.  It  is  insus- 
ceptible of  such  handling  as  is  accorded  a  play, 
for  example. 

A  man  with  more  or  less  experience  in  seeing 
plays   and   with   more   or   less   knowledge   of   the 
drama  goes  to  the  first  performance  of  a  new  com- 
edy or  tragedy  or  whatnot.     There  it  is  before  him 
in  speech  and  motion  and  color.     It  is  acted.     The 
play,   structurally,   is  good   or  bad;  the  acting  is 
either    good    or    bad.     Every    item    of    the    per- 
formance is  capable  of  being  resolved  separately 
and  estimated;  and  the  collective  interest  or  im- 
portance of  these  items  can  be  determined,  is,  in 
fact,  determined  once  and  for  all  by  the  perform- 
ance itself.     The  observer  gets  their  collective  im- 
pact at  once  and  his  task  is  really  nothing  but  a 
consideration  afterward  in  such  detail  as  he  cares 
to  enter  upon  of  just  how  that  impact  was  secured. 
Did  you  ever,  in  your  algebra  days,  or  even  in  your 
arithmetically  earnest  childhood,  "factor"  a  quan- 
tity or  a  number?     Take  91.     A  little  difficult,  91, 
but  after  some  mental  and  pencil  investigation  you 
found  that  it  was  obtained  by  multiplying  13  by  7. 
Very  well.     You  knew  how  the  impact  of  91  was 
produced;  it  was  produced  by  multiplying  13  by  7. 
You  had  reviewed  the  number  91  in  the  sense  that 
you  might  review  a  play. 

Now  it  is  impossible  to  review  a  book  as  you 
would  factor  a  number  or  a  play.     You  can't  be 


58  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

sure  of  the  factors  that  make  up  the  collective  im- 
pact of  the  book  upon  you.  There's  no  way  of 
getting  at  them.  They  are  summed  up  in  the  book 
itself  and  no  book  can  be  split  into  multipliable 
parts.  A  book  is  not  the  author  times  an  idea  times 
the  views  of  the  publisher.  A  book  is  unfactor- 
able,  often  undecipherable.  It  is  a  growth.  It  is 
a  series  of  accretions  about  a  central  thought.  The 
central  thought  is  like  the  grain  of  sand  which  the 
oyster  has  pearled  over.  The  central  thought  may 
even  be  a  diseased  thought  and  the  pearl  may  be  a 
very  lovely  and  brilliant  pearl,  superficially  at  least, 
for  all  that.  There  is  nothing  to  do  with  a  book 
but  to  take  it  as  it  is  or  go  at  it  hammer  and  tongs, 
scalpel  and  curette,  chisel  and  auger — smashing  it 
to  pieces,  scraping  and  cutting,  boring  and  cleav- 
ing through  the  layers  of  words  and  subsidiary 
ideas  and  getting  down  eventually  to  the  heart  of 
it,  to  the  grain  of  sand,  the  irritant  thought  that 
was  the  earliest  foundation. 

Such  surgery  may  be  highly  skilful  or  highly  and 
wickedly  destructive;  it  may  uncover  something 
worth  while  and  it  may  not;  naturally,  you  don't  go 
in  for  much  of  it,  if  you  are  wise,  and  as  a  gen- 
eral thing  you  take  a  book  as  it  is  and  not  as  it 
once  was  or  as  the  author  may,  in  the  innocence  of 
his  heart  or  the  subtlety  of  his  experience,  have 
intended  it  to  be. 


Book  "Reviewing"  59 


Surgery  on  a  book  is  like  surgery  on  a  human 
being,  for  a  book  is  alive;  ordinarily  the  only  justi- 
fication for  it  is  the  chance  of  saving  life.  If  the 
operator  can  save  the  author's  life  (as  an  author) 
by  cutting  he  ought  to  go  ahead,  of  course.  The 
fate  of  one  book  is  nothing  as  against  the  lives  of 
books  yet  unwritten;  the  feelings  of  the  author 
are  not  necessarily  of  more  account  than  the 
screams  of  the  sick  child's  parent.  There  have 
been  such  literary  operations  for  which,  in  lieu  of 
the  $1,000  fee  of  medical  practise,  the  surgeon  has 
been  rewarded  and  more  than  repaid  by  a  private 
letter  of  acknowledgement  and  heartfelt  thanks. 
No  matter  how  hard  up  the  recipient  of  such  a  let- 
ter may  be,  the  missive  seldom  turns  up  in  those 
auction  rooms  where  the  A.  L.  S.  (or  Autograph 
Letter  with  Signature)  sometimes  brings  an  unex- 
pected and  astonishingly  large  price. 

7 

There  is  a  good  deal  to  be  said  for  taking  a  book 
as  it  is.  Most  books,  in  fact,  should  be  taken  that 
way.  For  the  number  of  books  which  contain 
within  them  issues  of  life  and  death  is  always  very 
small.  You  may  handle  new  books  for  a  year  and 
come  upon  only  one  such.     And  when  you  do,  un- 


6o  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

less  you  recognize  its  momentousness,  no  responsi- 
bility rests  on  you  to  do  anything  except  follow  a 
routine  procedure.  In  this  domain  ignorance  is  a 
wholly  valid  excuse;  no  one  would  think  of  blam- 
ing a  general  practitioner  of  medicine  for  not  remov- 
ing the  patient's  vermiform  appendix  on  principle, 
so  to  say.  Unless  he  apprehended  conclusively 
that  the  man  had  appendicitis  and  unless  he  knew 
the  technique  of  the  operation  he  would  certainly 
be  blamed  for  performing  it.  Similarly,  unless  the 
handler  of  new  books  is  dead  sure  that  a  fatality 
threatens  Harold  Bell  Wright  or  John  Galsworthy 
or  Mary  Roberts  Rinehart,  unless  the  new 
book  of  Mr,  Wright  or  Mr.  Galsworthy  or 
Mrs.  Rinehart  is  a  recognizable  and  unmistak- 
able symptom,  unless,  further,  he  knows  what  to 
uncover  in  that  book  and  how  to  uncover  it,  he  has 
no  business  to  take  the  matter  in  hand  at  all. 
Though  the  way  of  most  "reviewers"  with  new 
books  suggests  that  their  fundamental  motto  must 
be  that  one  good  botch  deserves  another. 

Not  at  all.  Better,  if  you  don't  know  what  to 
do,  to  leave  bad  enough  alone. 

But  since  the  book  as  it  is  forms  99  percent,  of 
the  subject  under  consideration  this  aspect  of  deal- 
ing with  new  books  should  be  considered  first  and 
most  extensively.  Afterward  we  can  revert  to  the 
one  percent,  of  books  that  require  to  go  under  the 
knife. 


Book  "Reviewing"  6i 

8 

Now  the  secret  of  taking  a  book  as  it  is  was 
never  very  abstruse  and  is  always  perfectly  simple; 
nevertheless,  it  seems  utterly  to  elude  most  of  the 
persons  who  deal  with  new  books.  It  is  a  secret 
only  because  it  is  forever  hidden  from  their  eyes. 
Or  maybe  they  deliberately  look  the  other  way. 

There  exists  in  the  world  as  at  present  consti- 
tuted a  person  called  the  reporter.  He  is,  mostly, 
an  adjunct  of  the  daily  newspaper;  in  small  places, 
of  the  weekly  newspaper.  It  is,  however,  in  the 
cities  of  America  that  he  is  brought  to  his  perfec- 
tion and  in  this  connection  it  is  worth  while  point- 
ing out  what  Irvin  Cobb  has  already  noted — the 
difference  between  the  New  York  reporter  and  the 
reporter  of  almost  any  other  city  in  America.  The 
New  York  reporter  "works  with"  his  rival  on  an- 
other sheet;  the  reporter  outside  New  York  almost 
never  does  this.  Cobb  attributed  the  difference  to 
the  impossible  tasks  that  confront  reporters  in  New 
York,  impossible,  that  is,  for  single-handed  ac- 
complishment. A  man  who  should  attempt  to 
cover  alone  some  New  York  assignments,  to  "beat" 
his  fellow,  would  be  lost.  Of  course  where  a  New 
York  paper  details  half  a  dozen  men  to  a  job  real 
competition  between  rival  outfits  is  feasible  and 
sometimes  occurs.  But  the  point  here  is  this :  The 
New  York  reporter,  by  generally  "working  with" 


62  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

his  fellow  from  another  daily,  has  made  of  his 
work  a  profession,  with  professional  ideals  and 
standards,  a  code,  unwritten  but  delicate  and  de- 
cidedly high  rules  of  what  is  honorable  and  what 
is  not.  Elsewhere  reporting  remains  a  business, 
decently  conducted  to  be  sure,  open  in  many  in- 
stances to  manifestations  of  chivalry;  but  essen- 
tially keen,  sharp-edged,  cut-throat  competition. 

Now  it  is  of  the  reporter  in  his  best  and  highest 
estate  that  we  would  speak  here — the  reporter  who 
is  not  only  a  keen  and  honest  observer  but  a  happy 
recorder  of  what  he  sees  and  hears  and  a  profes- 
sional person  with  ethical  ideals  in  no  respect  in- 
ferior to  those  of  any  recognized  professional  man 
on  earth. 

There  are  many  things  which  such  a  reporter  will 
not  do  under  any  pressure  of  circumstance  or  at 
the  beck  of  any  promise  of  reward.  He  will  not 
distort  the  facts,  he  will  not  suppress  them,  he  will 
not  put  in  people's  mouths  words  that  they  did  not 
say  and  he  will  not  let  the  reader  take  their  words 
at  face  value  if,  in  the  reporter's  own  knowledge, 
the  utterance  should  be  perceptibly  discounted.  No 
reporter  can  see  and  hear  everything  and  no  re- 
porter's story  can  record  even  everything  that  the 
observer  contrived  to  see  and  hear.  It  must  record 
such  things  as  will  arouse  in  the  reader's  mind  a 
correct  image  and  a  just  impression. 

How   is   this   to  be  done?     Why,   there  is   no 


Book  "Reviewing"  63 

formula.  There's  no  set  of  rules.  There's  noth- 
ing but  a  purpose  animating  every  word  the  man 
writes,  a  purpose  served,  and  only  half -consciously 
served,  by  a  thousand  turns  of  expression,  a  thou- 
sand choices  of  words.  Like  all  honest  endeavors 
to  effect  a  purpose  the  thing  is  spoiled,  annulled, 
made  empty  of  result  by  deliberate  art.  Good  re- 
porters are  neither  born  nor  made;  they  evolve 
themselves  and  without  much  help  from  any  outside 
agency,  either.  They  can  be  hindered  but  not  pre- 
vented, helped  but  not  hurt.  You  may  remember  a 
saying  that  God  helps  those  who  help  themselves. 
The  common  interpretation  of  this  is  that  when  a 
man  gets  up  and  does  something  of  his  own  initia- 
tive Providence  is  pretty  likely  to  play  into  his 
hands  a  little ;  not  at  all,  that  isn't  what  the  proverb 
means.  What  it  does  mean  is  just  this:  That  those 
who  help  themselves,  who  really  do  lift  themselves 
by  their  bootstraps,  are  helped  by  God ;  that  it  isn't 
they  who  do  the  lifting  but  somebody  bigger  than 
themselves.  Now  there  is  no  doubt  whatever  that 
good  reporters  are  good  reporters  because  God 
makes  them  so.  They  aren't  good  reporters  at 
three  years  of  age;  they  get  to  be.  Does  this  seem 
discouraging?  It  ought  to  be  immensely  encour- 
aging, heartening,  actually  "uplifting"  in  the  finest 
sense  of  a  tormented  word.  For  if  we  believed 
that  good  reporters  were  born  and  not  made  there 
would  be  no  hope  for  any  except  the  gifted  few, 


64  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

endowed  from  the  start;  and  if  we  beheved  that 
good  reporters  were  made  and  not  bom  there  would 
be  absolutely  no  excuse  for  any  failures  whatever 
— every  one  should  be  potentially  a  good  reporter 
and  it  would  be  simply  a  matter  of  correct  train- 
ing. But  if  we  believe  that  a  good  reporter  is 
neither  born  nor  made,  but  makes  himself  with  the 
aid  of  God  we  can  be  unqualifiedly  cheerful.  There 
is  hope  for  almost  any  one  under  such  a  dispensa- 
tion; moreover,  if  we  believe  in  God  at  all  and  in 
mankind  at  all  we  must  believe  that  between  God 
and  mankind  the  supply  of  topnotch  reporters  will 
never  entirely  fail.  The  two  together  will  come 
pretty  nearly  meeting  the  demand  every  day  in  the 
year. 


Perhaps  the  reader  is  grumbling,  in  fact,  we  seem 
to  hear  murmurs.  What  has  all  this  about  the 
genesis  and  nature  of  good  reporters  to  do  with 
the  publication  of  new  books?  Why,  this:  The 
only  person  who  can  deal  adequately  and  amply 
with  99  new  books  out  of  a  hundred — the  99  that 
require  to  be  taken  as  they  are — is  the  good  re- 
porter. He's  the  boy  who  can  read  the  new  book 
as  he  would  look  and  listen  at  a  political  conven- 
tion, or  hop  around  at  a  fire— getting  the  facts,  get- 
ting them  straight  (yes,  indeed,  they  do  get  them 
straight)  and  setting  them  down,  swiftly  and  se- 


Book  "Reviewing"  65 

lectively,  to  reproduce  in  the  mind  of  the  pubHc 
the  precise  effect  of  the  book  itself.  The  effect — 
not  the  means  by  which  it  was  achieved,  not  the 
desirabihty  of  it  having  been  achieved,  not  the 
artistic  quality  of  it,  not  the  moral  worth  of  it,  not 
anything  in  the  way  of  a  corollary  or  lesson  or 
a  deduction,  however  obvious — just  the  effect. 
That's  reporting.  That's  getting  and  giving  the 
news.     And  that's  what  the  public  wants. 

Some  people  seem  to  think  there  is  something 
shameful  in  giving  the  public  what  it  wants.  They 
would,  one  supposes,  highly  commend  the  grocer 
who  gave  his  customer  something  "just  as  good" 
or  (according  to  the  grocer)  "decidedly  better." 
But  substitution,  open  or  concealed,  is  an  immoral 
practice.  Nothing  can  justify  it,  no  nobihty  of 
intention  can  take  it  out  of  the  class  of  deception 
and  cheating. 

But,  they  cry,  the  public  does  not  want  what  is 
sufficiently  good,  let  alone  what  is  best  for  it;  that 
is  why  it  is  wrong  to  give  the  public  what  it  wants. 
So  they  shift  their  ground  and  think  to  escape  on 
a  high  moral  plateau  or  table  land.  But  the  table 
land  is  a  tip-table  land.  What  they  mean  is  that 
they  are  confidently  setting  their  judgment  of  what 
the  public  ought  to  want  against  the  public's  plain 
decision  what  it  does  want.  They  are  a  few  dozens 
against  many  millions,  yet  in  their  few  dozen  intel- 
ligences is  collected  more  wisdom  than  has  been 


66  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

the  age-long  and  cumulative  inheritance  of  all  the 
other  sons  of  earth.  They  really  believe  that. 
.  .  .  Pitiable  ... 


lO 

A  new  book  is  news.  This  might  almost  be  set 
down  as  axiomatic  and  not  as  a  proposition  needing 
formal  demonstration  by  the  Euclidean  process. 
Yet  it  is  susceptible  of  such  demonstration  and  we 
shall  demonstrate  accordingly. 

In  the  strict  sense,  anything  that  happens  is  news. 
Everybody  remembers  the  old  distinction,  that  if 
a  dog  bites  a  man  it  is  very  likely  not  news,  but 
that  if  a  man  bites  a  dog  it  is  news  beyond  all  cavil. 
Such  a  generalization  is  useful  and  fairly  harm- 
less (like  the  generalization  we  ourselves  have  just 
indulged  in  and  are  about  proving)  if — a  big  if — ' 
the  broad  exception  be  noted.  If  a  dog  bites  John 
D.  Rockefeller,  Jr.,  it  is  not  only  news  but  rather 
more  important,  or  certainly  more  interesting,  news 
than  if  John  Jones  of  Howlersville  bites  a  dog. 
For  the  chances  are  that  John  Jones  of  Howlers- 
ville is  a  poor  demented  creature,  after  all.  Now 
the  dog  that  bites  Mr,  Rockefeller  is  very  likely 
a  poor,  demented  creature,  too;  but  the  distinction 
lies  in  this :  the  dog  bitten  by  John  Jones  is  almost 
certainly  not  as  well-known  or  as  interesting  or  as 
important  in  the  lives  of  a  number  of  people  as 


Book  "Reviewing"  67 

Mr.  Rockefeller.  Pair  off  the  cur  that  puts  his 
teeth  in  the  Rockefeller  ankle,  if  you  like,  with 
the  wretch  who  puts  his  teeth  in  an  innocent  canine 
bystander  (it's  the  innocent  bystander  who  always 
gets  hurt)  ;  do  this  and  you  still  have  to  match  up 
the  hound  of  Howlersville  with  Mr.  Rockefeller. 
And  the  scale  of  news  values  tips  heavily  away 
from  Howlersville  and  in  the  direction  of  26 
Broadway. 

So  it  is  plain  that  not  all  that  happens  is  news 
compared  with  some  that  happens.  The  law  of 
specific  interest,  an  intellectual  counterpart  of  the 
law  of  specific  gravity  in  the  physical  world,  rules 
in  the  world  of  events.  Any  one  handling  news 
who  disregards  this  law  does  so  at  his  extreme 
peril,  just  as  any  one  building  a  ship  heavier  than 
the  water  it  displaces  may  reasonably  expect  to 
see  his  fine  craft  sink  without  a  trace. 

Since  a  new  book  is  a  thing  happening  it  is  news, 
subject  to  the  broad  correction  we  have  been  dis- 
cussing above,  namely,  that  in  comparison  with 
other  new  books  it  may  not  be  news  at  all,  its  spe- 
cific interest  may  be  so  slight  as  to  be  negligible 
entirely. 

But  if  a  particular  new  book  is  news,  if  its  spe- 
cific interest  is  moderately  great,  then  obviously, 
we  think,  the  person  best  fitted  to  deal  with  it  is 
a  person  trained  to  deal  with  news,  namely,  a  re- 
porter.    Naturally  we  all  prefer  a  good  reporter. 


68  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


II 

The  question  will  at  once  be  raised :  How  is  the 
specific  interest  of  a  new  book  to  be  determined? 
We  answer :  Just  as  the  specific  interest  of  any  kind 
of  potential  news  or  actual  news  is  determined — 
in  competition  with  the  other  news  of  the  day  and 
hour.  What  is  news  one  day  isn't  news  another. 
This  is  a  phenomenon  of  which  the  regular  reader 
of  every  daily  paper  is  more  or  less  consciously 
aware.  There  are  some  days  when  "there's  no 
news  in  the  paper."  There  are  other  days  when 
the  news  in  the  paper  is  so  big  and  so  important 
that  all  the  lesser  occurrences  which  ordinarily  get 
themselves  chronicled  are  crowded  out.  Granting 
a  white  paper  supply  which  does  not  at  present  ex- 
ist, it  would,  of  course,  be  possible  on  the  "big 
days"  to  record  all  these  lesser  doings;  and  con- 
sistently, day  in  and  day  out,  to  print  nicely  pro- 
portioned accoimts  of  every  event  attaining  to  a 
certain  fixed  level  of  specific  interest.  But  the 
reader  who  may  think  he  would  like  this  would 
speedily  find  out  that  he  didn't.  Some  days  he 
would  have  a  twelve  page  newspaper  and  other 
days  (not  Sundays,  either)  he  would  have  one  of 
thirty-six  pages.  He  would  be  lost,  or  rather,  his 
attention  would  be  lost  in  the  jungle  of  events  that 
all  happened  within  twenty-four  hours,  with  the 
profuse  luxuriance  of  tropical  vegetation  shooting 


Bcx>k  "Reviewing"  69 


up  skyward  by  inches  and  feet  overnight.  His 
natural  appetite  for  a  knowledge  of  what  his  fel- 
lows were  doing  would  be  alternately  starved  and 
overfed;  malnutrition  would  lead  to  chronic  and 
incurable  dyspepsia;  soon  he  would  become  a  hate- 
ful misanthrope,  shunning  his  fellow  men  and  hav- 
ing a  seizure  every  time  Mr.  Hearst  brought  out 
the  eighth  edition  (which  is  the  earliest  and  first) 
of  the  New  York  Evening  Journal.  It  is  really 
dreadful  to  think  what  havoc  a  literal  adhesion  to 
the  motto  of  the  New  York  Times — "All  the  news 
that's  fit  to  print" — would  work  in  New  York  City. 

No  mortal  has  more  than  a  certain  amount  of 
time  daily  and  a  certain  amount  of  attention  (ac- 
cording to  his  mental  habit  and  personal  interest) 
to  bestow  on  the  perusal  of  a  newspaper,  or  news, 
or  the  printed  page  of  whatever  kind.  On  Sunday 
he  has  much  more,  it  is  likely,  but  still  there  is  a 
limit  and  a  perfectly  finite  bound.  Consequently 
the  whole  problem  for  the  persons  engaged  in 
gathering  and  preparing  news  for  presentation  to 
readers  sums  up  in  this:  "How  many  of  the  day's 
doings  attaining  or  exceeding  a  certain  level  of 
public  interest  and  importance,  shall  we  set  before 
our  clients?"  Easily  answered,  in  most  cases;  and 
the  size  of  the  paper  is  the  index  of  the  answer. 
Question  Two :  "What  of  the  day's  doings  shall  be 
served  up  in  the  determined  space?" 

For  this  question  there  is  never  an  absolute  or 


70  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ready  answer,  and  there  never  can  be.  On  some  of 
the  affairs  to  be  reported  all  journalists  would 
agree;  but  they  would  differ  in  their  estimates  of 
the  relative  worth  of  even  these  and  the  lengths  at 
which  they  should  be  treated;  about  lesser  occur- 
rences there  would  be  no  fixed  percentage  of  agree- 
ment. 

12 

Now  the  application  of  all  this  to  the  business  of 
giving  the  news  of  books  should  be  fairly  clear. 
A  new  book  is  news — and  so,  sometimes,  is  an  old 
one,  rediscovered.  Since  a  new  book  is  news  it 
should  be  dealt  with  by  a  news  reporter.  Not  all 
that  happens  is  news;  not  all  the  new  books  pub- 
lished are  news;  new  books,  like  new  events  of  all 
sorts,  are  news  when  they  compete  successfully 
with  a  majority  of  tlieir  kind. 

There  is  no  more  sense  in  reporting — that  is,  de- 
scribing individually  at  greater  or  less  length — all 
the  new  books  than  there  w^ould  be  in  reporting 
every  incident  on  the  police  blotters  of  a  lively 
American  city.  Recording  new  books  is  another 
matter;  somewhere,  somehow,  most  occurrences  in 
this  world  get  recorded  in  written  words  that  reach 
nearly  all  who  are  interested  in  the  happenings  (as 
in  letters)  or  are  accessible  to  the  interested  few 
(as  the  police  records).  The  difference  between  the 
reporter  and  the  recorder  is  not  entirely  a  difference 


Book  "Reviewing"  71 

of  details  given.  The  recorder  usually  follows  a  pre- 
scribed formula  and  makes  his  record  conform 
thereto ;  the  good  reporter  never  has  a  formula  and 
never  can  have  one.  Let  us  see  how  this  works  out 
with  the  news  of  books. 

The  recorder  of  new  books  generally  compiles  a 
list  of  Books  Received  or  Books  Just  Published  and 
he  does  it  in  this  uninspired  and  conscientious  man- 
ner: 

IN  THE  HEART  OF  A  FOOL.  By  William 
Allen  White.  A  story  of  Kansas  in  the  last 
half-century,  centered  in  a  single  town,  show- 
ing its  evolution  from  prairie  to  an  industrial 
city  with  difficult  economic  and  labor  prob- 
lems; the  story  told  in  the  lives  of  a  group  of 
people,  pioneers  and  the  sons  of  pioneers — 
their  work,  ambitions,  personal  affairs,  &c. 
New  York:  The  Macmillan  Company.     $1.60. 

That  would  be  under  the  heading  Fiction.  An  en- 
ti-y  under  the  heading  Literary  Studies  or  Essays 
might  read : 

OUR  POETS  OF  TO-DAY.  By  Howard  Willard 
Cook.  Volume  H.  in  a  series  of  books  on 
modern  American  writers.  Sketches  of  sixty- 
eight   American  poets,   nearly  all  living,   in- 


y2  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

eluding  Edgar  Lee  Masters,  Amy  Lowell, 
Witter  Bynner,  Robert  Service,  Edgar  Guest, 
Charles  Divine,  Carl  Sandburg,  Joyce  Kilmer, 
Sara  Teasdale,  George  Edward  Woodberry, 
Percy  Mackaye,  Harriet  W.  Monroe,  &c. 
New  York :  Moffat,  Yard  &  Co.     $i.6o. 

These  we  hasten  to  say  would  be  imusually  full 
and  satisfactory  records,  but  they  would  be  records 
just  the  same — formal  and  precise  statements  of 
events,  like  the  chronological  facts  affixed  to  dates 
in  an  almanac.  If  all  records  were  like  these 
there  would  be  less  objection  to  them;  but  it  is  an 
astonishing  truth  that  most  records  are  badly  kept. 
Why,  one  may  never  fathom;  since  the  very  for- 
mality and  precision  make  a  good  record  easy. 
Yet  almost  any  of  the  principal  pages  or  magazines 
in  the  United  States  devoted  to  the  news  of  new 
books  is  likely  to  make  a  record  on  this  order: 

IN  THE  HEART  OF  A  FOOL.  By  WilHam 
Allen  White.  Novel  of  contemporary  Amer- 
ican life.     New  York,  &c. 

Such  a  record  is,  of  course,  worse  than  inade- 
quate ;  it  is  actually  misleading.  Mr.  White's  book 
happens  to  cover  a  period  of  fifty  years.  "Con- 
temporary American  life"  would  characterize  quite 
as  well,  or  quite  as  badly,  a  story  of  New  York 
and  Tuxedo  by  Robert  W.  Chambers. 


Book  "Reviewing"  j-X) 


14 

The  reporter  works  in  entirely  another  manner. 
He  is  concerned  to  present  the  facts  about  a  new 
book  in  a  way  sufficiently  arresting  and  entertain- 
ing to  engage  the  reader.  As  Mr.  Holliday  says 
with  fine  perception,  the  true  function  of  the  de- 
scriber  of  new  books  is  simply  to  bring  a  particu- 
lar volume  to  the  attention  of  its  proper  public. 
To  do  that  it  is  absolutely  necessary  to  "give  the 
book,"  at  least  to  the  extent  of  enabling  the  reader 
of  the  article  to  determine,  with  reasonable  accu- 
racy (i)  whether  the  book  is  for  him,  that  is,  ad- 
dressed to  a  public  of  which  he  is  one,  and  (2) 
whether  he  wants  to  read  it  or  not. 

Whether  the  book  is  good  or  bad  is  not  the  point. 
A  man  interested  in  sociology  may  conceivably 
want  to  read  a  book  on  sociology  even  though  it  is 
an  exceedingly  bad  book  on  that  subject  and  even 
though  he  knows  its  worthlessness.  He  may  want 
to  profit  by  the  author's  mistakes;  he  may  want  to 
write  a  book  to  correct  them;  or  he  may  merely 
want  to  be  amused  at  the  spectacle  of  a  fellow  soci- 
ologist making  a  fool  of  himself,  a  spectacle  by 
no  means  rare  but  hardly  ever  without  a  capacity 
for  giving  joy  to  the  mildly  malicious. 

The  determination  of  the  goodness  or  badness 
of  a  book  is  not  and  should  not  be  a  deliberate 
purpose  of  the  good  book  reporter.     Why?     Well, 


74  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

in  many  cases  it  is  a  task  of  supererogation.  Take 
a  reporter  who  goes  to  cover  a  pubhc  meeting  at 
which  speeches  are  made.  He  does  not  find  it 
necessary  to  say  that  Mr.  So-and-So's  speech  was 
good.  He  records  what  Mr.  So-and-So  says,  or  a 
fair  sample  of  it;  which  is  enough.  The  reader 
can  see  for  himself  how  good  or  bad  it  was  and 
reach  a  conclusion  based  on  the  facts  as  tempered 
by  his  personal  beliefs,  tastes  and  ideas. 

In  the  same  way,  it  is  superfluous  for  the  book 
reporter  to  say  that  Miss  Such-and-Such's  book  on 
New  York  is  rotten.  All  he  need  do  is  to  set  down 
the  incredible  fact  that  Miss  Such-and-Such  locates 
the  Wool  worth  building  at  Broadway,  Fifth  Avenue 
and  Twenty-third  street,  and  refers  to  the  Aquarium 
as  the  fisheries  section  of  the  Bronx  Zoo.  If  this 
should  not  appear  a  sufficient  notice  of  the  horrible 
nature  of  the  volume  the  reporter  may  very  properly 
give  the  truth  about  the  Woolworth  building  and  the 
Aquarium  for  the  benefit  of  people  who  have  never 
visited  New  York  and  might  be  unable  to  detect 
Miss  Such-and-Such's  idiosyncrasies. 

The  rule  holds  in  less  tangible  matters.  Why 
should  the  book  reporter  ask  his  reader  to  accept 
his  dictum  that  the  literary  style  of  a  writer  is 
atrocious  when  he  can  easily  prove  it  by  a  few  sen- 
tences or  a  paragraph  from  the  book? 


Book  "Reviewing"  75 

Yet  books  are  still  in  the  main  "reviewed,"  in- 
stead of  being  given  into  the  hands  of  trained  news 
reporters.  Anything  worse  than  the  average  book 
"review"  it  would  certainly  be  difficult  to  find  in 
the  length  and  breadth  of  America.  And  England, 
despite  the  possession  of  some  brilliant  talents,  is 
nearly  as  badly  off. 

No  one  who  is  not  qualified  as  a  critic  should 
attempt  to  criticise  new  books. 

There  are  but  few  critics  in  any  generation — 
half  a  dozen  or  perhaps  a  dozen  men  in  any  single 
one  of  the  larger  countries  are  all  who  could  qual- 
ify at  a  given  time;  that  much  seems  evident. 
What  is  a  critic  ?  A  critic  is  a  person  with  an  edu- 
cation unusually  wide  either  in  life  or  in  letters, 
and  preferably  in  both.  He  is  a  person  with  huge 
backgrounds.  He  has  read  thousands  of  books 
and  has  by  one  means  or  another  abstracted  the 
essence  of  thousands  more.  He  has  perhaps 
travelled  a  good  deal,  though  this  is  not  essential; 
but  he  has  certainly  lived  with  a  most  peculiar  and 
exceptional  intensity,  descending  to  greater  emo- 
tional and  intellectual  depths  than  the  majority  of 
mankind  and  scaling  higher  summits;  he  has,  in 
some  degree,  the  faculty  of  living  other  people's 
lives  and  sharing  their  human  experiences  which  is 
the  faculty  that,  in  a  transcendant  degree,  belongs 


76  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

to  the  novelist  and  storyteller.  A  critic  knows  the 
past  and  the  present  so  well  that  he  is  able  to  erect 
standards,  or  uncover  old  standards,  by  which  he 
can  and  does  measure  the  worth  of  everything  that 
comes  before  him.  He  can  actually  show  you,  in 
exact  and  inescapable  detail,  how  De  Morgan  com- 
pares with  Dickens  and  how  Gilbert  K.  Chesterton 
ranks  with  Swift  and  whether  Thackeray  learned 
more  from  Fielding  or  from  Daniel  Defoe  and  he 
can  trace  the  relation  between  a  period  in  the  life 
of  Joseph  Conrad  and  certain  scenes  and  settings  in 
The  Arrow  of  Gold. 

Such  a  man  is  a  critic.  Of  course  critics  make 
mistakes  but  they  are  not  mistakes  of  ignorance,  of 
personal  unfitness  for  the  task,  of  pretension  to  a 
knowledge  they  haven't.  They  are  mistakes  of 
judgment;  such  mistakes  as  very  eminent  jurists 
sometimes  make  after  years  on  the  bench.  The 
jurist  is  reversed  by  the  higher  court  and  the  critic 
is  reversed  by  the  appellate  decree  of  the  future. 

The  mistakes  of  a  real  critic,  like  the  mistakes  of 
a  real  jurist,  are  always  made  on  defensible,  and 
sometimes  very  sound,  grounds;  they  are  reasoned 
and  seasoned  conclusions  even  if  they  are  not  the 
correct  conclusions.  The  mistakes  of  the  9,763  per- 
sons who  assume  the  critical  ermine  without  any 
fitness  to  wear  it  are  quite  another  matter;  and 
they  are  just  the  mistakes  that  would  be  made 
by   a   layman   sitting   in   the   jurist's   seat.     The 


Book  "Reviewing"  y'j 

jurist  knows  the  precedents,  the  rules  of  evidence, 
the  law;  he  is  tolerant  and  admits  exceptions  into 
the  record.  So  the  critic;  with  the  difference  that 
the  true  critic  merely  presides  and  leaves  the  ver- 
dict to  that  great  jury  of  true  and  right  instincts 
which  we  call  "the  public."  The  genuine  critic  is 
concerned  chiefly  to  see  that  the  case  gets  before  the 
jury  cleanly.  Without  presuming  to  tell  the  jury 
what  its  verdict  must  be — except  in  extraordinary 
circumstances — he  does  instruct  it  what  the  verdict 
should  be  on,  what  should  be  considered  in  arriv- 
ing at  it,  what  principles  should  guide  the  decision. 

But  the  near-critic  (God  save  the  mark!)  has  it 
in  his  mind  that  he  must  play  judge  and  jury  too. 
He  doesn't  like  the  writer's  style,  or  thinks  the  plot 
is  poor,  or  this  bad  or  that  defective.  Instead  of 
carefully  outlining  the  evidence  on  which  the  pub- 
lic might  reach  a  correct  verdict  on  these  points  he 
delivers  a  dictum.  It  doesn't  go,  of  course,  at 
least  for  long;  and  it  never  will. 

Let  us  be  as  specific  as  is  possible  in  this,  as  spe- 
cific, that  is,  as  a  general  discussion  can  be  and 
remain  widely  applicable. 

I  don't  like  the  writer's  style.  I  am  not  a  per- 
son of  critical  equipment  or  pretensions.  I  am,  we 
will  say,  a  book  reporter.  I  do  not  declare,  with 
a  fiat  and  a  flourish,  that  the  style  is  bad ;  I  merely 
present  a  chunk  of  it.  There  is  the  evidence,  and 
nothing  else  is  so  competent,  so  relevant  or  so  ma- 


78  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

terlal,  as  the  lawyers  would  say.  I  may,  in  the 
necessity  to  be  brief  and  the  absence  of  space  for 
an  excerpt,  say  that  the  style  is  adjectival,  or  ad- 
verbial, or  diffuse,  or  involved  or  florid  or  some- 
thing of  that  sort,  if  I  know  it  to  be.  These  would 
be  statements  of  fact.  "Bad"  is  a  statement  of 
opinion. 

I  may  call  the  plot  "weak"  if  it  is  weak  (a  fact) 
and  if  I  know  weakness  in  a  plot  (which  qualifies 
me  to  announce  the  fact).  But  if  I  call  the  plot 
"poor"  I  am  taking  a  good  deal  upon  myself.  Its 
poorness  is  a  matter  of  opinion.  Some  stories  are 
spoiled  by  a  strong  plot  which  dominates  the  reader's 
interest  almost  to  the  exclusion  of  other  things — 
fine  characterization,  atmosphere,  and  so  on. 

And  even  restrictions  of  space  can  hardly  excuse 
the  lack  of  courtesy,  or  worse,  shown  by  the  near- 
critic  who  calls  the  plot  weak  or  the  style  diffuse  or 
involved,  however  much  these  may  be  facts,  and 
who  does  not  at  least  briefly  explain  in  what  way 
the  style  is  diffuse  (or  involved)  and  wherein  the 
weakness  of  the  plot  resides.  But  to  put  a  finger 
on  the  how  or  the  where  or  the  why  requires  a 
knowledge  and  an  insight  that  the  near-critic  does 
not  possess  and  will  not  take  the  trouble  to  acquire; 
so  we  are  asking  him  to  do  the  impossible.  Never- 
theless we  can  ask  him  to  do  the  possible;  and  that 
is  to  leave  off  talking  or  writing  on  matters  he 
knows  nothing  about. 


Book  "Reviewing"  79 

16 

The  task  of  training  good  book  reporters  is  not 
a  thing  to  be  easily  and  lightly  undertaken.  And 
the  first  essential  in  the  making  of  such  a  reporter 
is  the  inculcation  of  a  considerable  humility  of 
mind.  A  near-critic  can  afford  to  think  he  knows 
it  all,  but  a  book  reporter  cannot.  Besides  a  sense 
of  his  own  limitations  the  book  reporter  must  pos- 
sess and  develop  afresh  from  time  to  time  a  mental 
attitude  which  may  best  be  summed  up  in  this  dis- 
tinction :  When  a  piece  of  writing  seems  to  him 
defective  he  must  stop  short  and  ask  himself,  "Is 
this  defect  a  fact  or  is  it  my  personal  feeling?"  If 
it  is  a  fact  he  must  establish  it  to  his  own,  and 
then  to  the  reader's,  satisfaction.  If  it  is  his  per- 
sonal impression  or  feeling,  merely,  as  he  may  con- 
clude on  maturer  reflection,  he  owes  it  to  those 
who  will  read  his  article  either  not  to  record  it  or 
to  record  it  as  a  personal  thing.  There  is  no  sense 
in  saying  only  the  good  things  that  can  be  said 
about  a  book  that  has  bad  things  in  it.  Such  a 
course  is  dishonest.  It  is  equally  dishonest,  and 
infinitely  more  common,  to  pass  off  private  opin- 
ions as  statements  of  fact. 

When  in  doubt,  the  doubt  should  be  resolved  in 
favor  of  the  author.  A  good  working  test  of 
fact  versus  personal  opinion  is  this :  If  you,  as  a 
reporter,  cannot  put  your  finger  on  the  apparent 


8o  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

flaw,  cannot  give  the  how  or  where  or  why  of  the 
thing  that  seems  wrong,  it  must  be  treated  as  your 
personal  feehng.  A  fact  that  you  cannot  buttress 
might  as  well  not  be  a  fact  at  all — unless,  of  course, 
it  is  self-evident,  in  which  case  you  have  only  to 
state  it  or  exhibit  your  evidence  to  command  a  uni- 
versal assent. 

All  that  we  have  been  saying  respecting  the  fact 
or  fancy  of  a  flaw  in  a  piece  of  writing  applies  with 
equal  force,  naturally,  to  the  favorable  as  well  as 
the  unfavorable  conclusion  you,  as  a  book  reporter, 
may  reach.  Because  a  story  strikes  you  as  won- 
derful it  does  not  follow  that  it  is  wonderful.  You 
are  under  a  moral  obligation,  at  least,  to  establish 
the  wonder  of  it.  The  procedure  for  the  book  re- 
porter who  has  to  describe  favorably  and  for  the 
book  reporter  who  has  to  report  unfavorably  is  the 
same.  First  comes  the  question  of  fact,  then  the 
citation,  if  possible,  of  evidence;  and  if  that  be 
impossible  the  brief  indication  of  the  how,  the 
where,  the  why  of  the  merit  reported.  If  the  meri- 
toriousness  remains  a  matter  of  personal  impres- 
sion it  ought  so  to  be  characterized  but  may  warrant- 
ably  be  recorded  where  an  adverse  impression 
would  go  unmentioned.  The  presumption  is  in 
favor  of  the  author.     It  should  be  kept  so. 


Book  "Reviewing"  8i 


17 

In  all  this  there  is  nothing  impossible,  nothing 
millennial.  But  what  has  been  outlined  of  the 
work  of  the  true  book  reporter  is  as  far  as  possible 
from  what  we  very  generally  get  to-day.  We  get 
unthinking  praise  and  unthinking  condemnation; 
we  do  not  expect  analysis  but  we  have  a  right  to 
expect  straightaway  exposition  and  a  condensed 
transliteration  of  the  book  being  dealt  with. 

"Praise,"  we  have  just  said,  and  "condemna- 
tion." That  is  what  it  is,  and  there  is  no  room  in 
the  book  reporter's  task  either  for  praise  or  con- 
demnation. He  is  not  there  to  praise  the  book 
any  more  than  a  man  is  at  a  political  convention 
to  praise  a  nominating  speech;  he  is  there  to  de- 
scribe the  book,  to  describe  the  speech,  to  report 
either.  A  newspaperman  who  should  begin  his  ac- 
count of  a  meeting  in  this  fashion,  "In  a  lamentably 
poor  speech,  showing  evidences  of  hasty  prepara- 
tion, Elihu  Root,"  &c.,  would  be  fired — and  ought 
to  be.  No  matter  if  a  majority  of  those  who  heard 
Mr.  Root  thought  the  same  way  about  it. 

18 

The  book  reporter  will  be  governed  in  his  work 
by  the  precise  news  value  in  the  book  he  is  dealing 


82  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

with  at  the  moment  he  is  dealing  with  it.  This 
needs  illustration. 

On  November  ii,  1918,  an  armistice  was  con- 
cluded in  Europe,  terminating  a  war  that  had  lasted 
over  four  years.  In  that  four  years  books  relat- 
ing to  the  war  then  being  waged  had  sold  heavily, 
even  at  times  outselling  fiction.  Had  the  war 
drawn  to  a  gradual  end  the  sales  of  these  war  books 
would  probably  have  lessened,  little  by  little,  until 
they  reached  and  maintained  a  fairly  steady  level. 
From  this  they  would  doubtless  have  declined,  as 
the  end  drew  near,  lower  and  lower,  until  the  fore- 
seen end  came,  when  the  interest  in  them  would 
have  been  as  great,  but  not  much  greater,  than  the 
normal  interest  in  works  of  a  historical  or  biograph- 
ical sort. 

But  the  end  came  overnight;  and  suddenly  the 
whole  face  of  the  world  was  transformed.  The  re- 
action in  the  normal  person  was  intense.  In  an 
instant  war  books  of  several  pronounced  types  be- 
came intolerable  reading.  How  I  Reacted  to  the 
War  by  Quintus  Quintuple  seemed  tremendously 
unimportant.  Even  Mr.  Britling  was,  momentar- 
ily, utterly  stale  and  out  of  date.  Reminiscences 
of  the  German  ex-Kaiser  were  neither  interesting 
nor  important;  he  was  a  fugitive  in  Holland. 

The  book  reporter  who  had  any  sense  of  news 
values  grasped  this  immediately.  Books  that  a 
month   earlier  would   have  been   worth   1,000  to 


Book  "Reviewing"  83 

1,500  word  articles  were  worth  a  few  lines  or  no 
space  at  all.  On  the  other  hand  books  which  had 
a  historical  value  and  a  place  as  interesting  public 
records,  such  as  Ambassador  Morgenthau's  Story, 
were  not  diminished  either  in  interest  or  in  impor- 
tance. 

Some  books  which  had  been  inconsequential  were 
correspondingly  exalted  by  the  unprecedented  turn 
of  affairs.  These  were  books  on  such  subjects  as 
the  re-education  of  disabled  fighters,  the  principles 
which  might  underlie  the  formation  of  a  league  of 
nations,  problems  of  reconstruction  of  every  sort. 
They  had  been  worth,  some  of  them,  very  small 
articles  a  week  earlier;  now  they  were  worth  a 
column  or  two  apiece. 

No  doubt  we  ought  to  conclude  this  possibly  tedi- 
ous essay  with  some  observations  on  the  one  per 
cent,  of  books  which  call  for  swift  surgery.  But 
such  an  enterprise  is,  if  not  impossible,  extraor- 
dinarily difficult  for  the  reason  that  the  same  opera- 
tion is  never  called  for  twice. 

In  a  sense  it  is  like  cutting  diamonds,  or  splitting 
a  large  stone  into  smaller  stones.  The  problem 
varies  each  time.  The  cutter  respects  certain  prin- 
ciples and  follows  a  careful  technique.     That  is  all. 

We  shall,  for  the  sake  of  the  curious,  take  an 


84  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

actual  instance.  In  191 8  there  was  pubhshed  a 
novel  called  Foes  by  Mary  Johnston,  an  American 
novelist  of  an  endowment  so  decided  as  fairly  to 
entitle  her  to  the  designation  "a  genius." 

Miss  Johnston's  first  novel  had  appeared  twenty 
years  earlier.  Her  first  four  books — nay,  her  first 
two,  the  second  being  To  Have  and  to  Hold — 
placed  her  firmly  in  the  front  rank  of  living  roman- 
tic writers.  The  thing  that  distinguished  her 
romanticism  was  its  sense  of  drama  in  human  af- 
fairs and  human  destiny.  Added  to  this  was  a 
command  of  live,  nervous,  highly  poetic  prose. 
History — romance;  it  did  not  matter.  She  could 
set  either  movingly  before  you. 

Her  work  showed  steady  progress,  reaching  a 
sustained  culmination  in  her  two  Civil  War  novels. 
The  Long  Roll  and  Cease  Firing.  She  experi- 
mented a  little,  as  in  her  poetic  drama  of  the 
French  Revolution,  The  Goddess  of  Reason,  and  in 
The  Fortunes  of  Garin,  a  tapestry  of  mediaeval 
France.  The  Wanderers  was  a  more  decided  ven- 
ture, but  a  perfectly  successful.     Then  came  Foes. 

Considered  purely  as  a  romantic  narrative,  as  a 
story  of  friendship  transformed  into  hatred  and  the 
pursuit  of  a  private  feud  under  the  guise  of  wreak- 
ing Divine  vengeance,  Foes  is  a  superb  tale.  Con- 
sidered as  a  novel.  Foes  is  a  terrible  failure. 

Why?  Is  it  not  sufficient  to  write  a  superb  tale? 
Yes,  if  you  have  essayed  nothing  more.     Is  a  novel 


Book  "Reviewing"  85 

anything  more  than  "a.  good  story,  well  told"? 
Yes,  if  the  writer  essays  to  make  more  of  it. 

The  novelist  who  has  aimed  at  nothing  beyond 
the  ''good  story,  well  told"  has  a  just  grievance 
against  any  one  who  asks  anything  further.  But 
against  the  novelist  who  has  endeavored  to  make 
his  story,  however  good,  however  well  told,  the 
vehicle  for  a  human  philosophy  or  a  metaphysical 
speculation,  the  reader  has  a  just  grievance — if  the 
endeavor  has  been  unsuccessful  or  if  the  philosophy 
is  unsound. 

Now  as  to  the  soundness  or  unsoundness  of  a 
particular  philosophy  every  reader  must  pronounce 
for  himself.  The  metaphysical  idea  which  was  the 
basis  of  Miss  Johnston's  novel  was  this:  All  gods 
are  one.  All  deities  are  one.  Christ,  Buddha;  it 
matters  not.  "There  swam  upon  him  another  great 
perspective.  He  saw  Christ  in  light,  Buddha  in 
light.  The  glorified — the  unified.  Union/'  Up- 
on this  idea  Miss  Johnston  reconciles  her  two  foes. 

This  perfectly  comprehensible  mystical  concep- 
tion is  the  rock  on  which  the  whole  story  is  founded 
— and  the  rock  on  which  it  goes  to  pieces.  It  will 
be  seen  at  once  that  the  conception  is  one  which 
no  Christian  can  entertain  and  remain  a  Christian 
— nor  any  Buddhist,  and  remain  a  Buddhist,  either. 
To  the  vast  majority  of  mankind,  therefore,  the 
philosophy  of  Foes  was  unsound  and  the  novel  was 


86  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

worthless  except  for  the  superficial  incidents  and 
the  lovely  prose  in  which  they  were  recounted. 

It  might  be  thought  that  for  those  who  accepted 
the  mystical  concept  Miss  Johnson  imposed,  Foes 
would  have  been  a  novel  of  the  first  rank.  No, 
indeed;  and  for  this  reason: 

Her  piece  of  mysticism  was  supposed  to  be  ar- 
rived at  and  embraced  by  a  dour  Scotchman  of 
about  the  year  of  Our  Lord  1750.  It  was  supposed 
to  transform  the  whole  nature  of  that  man  so  as  to 
lead  him  to  give  over  a  life-long  enmity  in  which 
he  had  looked  upon  himself  as  a  Divine  instrument 
to  punish  an  evil-doer. 

Now  however  reasonable  or  sound  or  inspiring 
and  inspiriting  the  mystical  idea  may  have  seemed 
to  any  reader,  he  could  not  but  be  fatally  aware 
that,  as  presented,  the  thing  was  a  flat  impossibility. 
Scotchmen  of  the  year  1750  were  Christians  above 
all  else.  They  were,  if  you  like,  savage  Christians; 
some  of  them  were  irreligious,  some  of  them  were 
God-defying,  none  of  them  were  Deists  in  the  all-in- 
clusive sense  that  Miss  Johnston  prescribes.  The 
idea  that  Christ  and  Buddha  might  possibly  be 
nothing  but  different  manifestations  of  the  Deity  is 
an  idea  which  could  never  have  occurred  to  the 
eighteenth  century  Scotch  mind — and  never  did. 
Least  of  all  could  it  have  occurred  to  such  a  man 
as  Miss  Johnston  delineates  in  Alexander  Jardine. 

The  thing  is  therefore  utterly  anachronistic.     It 


Book  "Reviewing"  87 

is  a  historical  anachronism,  if  you  Hke,  the  history 
here  being  the  history  of  the  human  spirit  in  its 
religious  aspects.  Every  reader  of  the  book,  no 
matter  how  willing  he  may  have  been  to  accept  the 
novelist's  underlying  idea,  was  aware  that  the  en- 
deavor to  convey  it  had  utterly  failed,  was  aware 
that  Miss  Johnston  had  simply  projected  her  idea, 
her  favorite  bit  of  mysticism,  into  the  mind  of  one 
of  her  characters,  a  Scotchman  living  a  century  and 
a  half  earlier!  But  the  thoughts  that  one  may 
think  in  the  twentieth  century  while  tramping  the 
Virginia  hills  are  not  thoughts  that  could  have 
dawned  in  the  mind  of  a  Scottish  laird  in  the  eigh- 
teenth century,  not  even  though  he  lay  in  the  flower- 
ing grass  of  the  Roman  Campagna. 

.  .  .  And  so  there,  in  Foes,  we  have  the  book 
in  a  hundred  which  called  for  something  more  than 
the  intelligent  and  accurate  work  of  the  book  re- 
porter. Here  was  a  case  of  a  good  novelist,  and 
a  very,  very  good  one,  gone  utterly  wrong.  It  was 
not  sufficient  to  convey  to  the  prospective  reader 
a  just  idea  of  the  story  and  of  the  qualities  of  it. 
It  was  necessary  to  cut  and  slash,  as  cleanly  and  as 
swiftly  and  as  economically  as  possible — and  as 
dispassionately — to  the  root  of  the  trouble.  For 
if  Miss  Johnston  were  to  repeat  this  sort  of  per- 
formance her  reputation  would  suffer,  not  to  speak 
of  her  royalties;  readers  would  be  enraged  or  mis- 
led; young  writers  playing  the  sedulous  ape  would 


88  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

inflict  dreadful  things  upon  us;  tastes  and  tempers 
would  be  spoiled;  publishers  would  lose  money; — 
and,  much  the  worst  of  all,  the  world  would  be  de- 
prived of  the  splendid  work  Mary  Johnston  could 
do  while  she  was  doing  the  exceedingly  bad  work 
she  did  do. 

Perhaps  the  most  disturbing  thing  about  the 
blunder  in  Foes  was  the  fact  that  there  was  no 
necessity  for  it.  The  Christian  religion,  which  was 
the  religion  of  Alexander  Jardine,  provides  for 
reconciliation,  indeed,  it  exacts  it.  There  was  the 
way  for  Miss  Johnston  to  bring  her  foes  together. 
Of  course,  it  would  not  have  been  intellectually  so 
exciting.  But  there  is  such  a  thing  as  emotional 
appeal,  and  it  is  not  always  base;  there  are  emo- 
tions in  the  human  so  high  and  so  lofty  that  it  is 
wiser  not  to  try  to  transcend  them.  .  .  . 

The  appearance  of  part  of  the  foregoing  in  Books 
and  the  Book  World  of  The  Sun,  New  York, 
brought  a  letter  from  Kansas  which  should  find  a 
place  in  this  volume.  The  letter,  with  the  attempted 
answer,  may  as  well  be  given  here.  The  writer  is 
head  of  the  English  department  in  a  State  col- 
lege.   He  wrote: 

20 

"I  hope  that  the  mails  lost  for  your  college  pro- 
fessors of  English  subscribers  their  copies  of  Books 


Book  "Reviewing"  89 

and  the  Book  World  [containing  the  foregoing  ob- 
servations on  Book  Reporting].  .  .  .  College  pro- 
fessors do  not  like  to  be  disturbed — and  most  of 
us  cannot  be,  for  that  matter.  The  TNT  in  those 
pages  was  not  meant  for  us,  perhaps,  but  it  should 
have  been. 

"When  I  read  Book  Reporting  I  dictated  three 
pages  of  protest,  but  did  not  send  it  on — thanks  to 
my  better  judgment,  .  .  .  Then  I  decided,  since 
you  had  added  so  much  to  my  perturbation,  to  ask 
you  to  help  me. 

"We  need  it  out  here — literary  help  only,  of 
course.  This  is  the  only  State  college  on  what  was 
once  known  as  the  'Great  Plains.'  W.  F.  Cody 
won  his  sobriquet  on  Government  land  which  is  now 
our  campus.  Our  students  are  the  sons  and  daugh- 
ters of  pioneers  who  won  over  grasshoppers, 
droughts,  hot  winds  and  one  crop  farms.  They 
are  so  near  to  real  life  that  the  teaching  of  litera- 
ture must  be  as  real  as  the  literature — rather,  it 
ought  to  be.     That's  where  I  want  you  to  help  me. 

"I  am  not  teaching  literature  here  now  as  I  was 
taught  geology  back  in  Missouri.  That's  as  near 
as  I  shall  tell  you  how  I  teach — it  is  bad  enough 
and  you  might  not  help  me  if  I  did.  (Perhaps, 
in  fairness  to  you,  I  should  say  that  for  several 
years  never  less  than  one-third  of  those  to  whom 
we  gave  degrees  have  majored  in  English,  and  al- 


90  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ways  as  many  as  the  next  two  departments  com- 
bined.) 

"Here's  what  I  am  tired  of  and  want  to  get 
away  from: 

"i.  Testing  students  on  reading  a  book  by  ask- 
ing fact  questions  about  what  is  in  the  book — 
memory  work,  you  see. 

"2.  Demanding  of  students  a  scholarship  in  the 
study  of  literature  that  is  so  academic  that  it  is 
Prussian. 

"3.  Demanding  that  students  serve  time  in  lit- 
erature classes  as  a  means  of  measuring  their  ad- 
vance in  the  study  of  literature. 

"Here's  what  I  want  you  to  help  me  with  in  some 
definite  concrete  way:  (Sounds  like  a  college  pro- 
fessor making  an  assignment — beg  pardon.) 

"i.  Could  you  suggest  a  scheme  of  'book  re- 
porting' for  college  students  in  literature  classes? 
(An  old  book  to  a  new  person  Is  news,  isn't  it?) 

"2.  Give  me  a  list  of  books  published  during 
the  last  ten  years  that  should  be  included  in  college 
English  laboratory  classes  in  literature.  I  want 
your  list.  I  have  my  own,  but  fear  it  is  too  aca- 
demic. 

"3.  What  are  some  of  the  things  which  should 
enter  into  the  training  of  teachers  of  high  school 
English?  Part  of  our  work,  especially  in  the  simi- 
mer,  is  to  give  such  training  to  men  and  women 


Book  "Reviewing"  91 

who  will  teach  composition  and  literature  in  Kan- 
sas high  schools. 

"Your  help  will  not  only  be  appreciated,  but  it 
will  be  used." 

21 

To  answer  adequately  these  requests  would  take 
about  six  months'  work  and  the  answers  would 
make  a  slender  book.  And  then  they  would  exhibit 
the  defects  inseparable  from  a  one  man  response. 
None  of  which  excuses  a  failure  to  attempt  to  an- 
swer, though  it  must  extenuate  failures  in  the  at- 
tempt. 

We  shall  try  to  answer,  in  this  place,  though 
necessarily  without  completeness.  If  nothing  bet- 
ter than  a  few  suggestions  is  the  result,  why — sug- 
gestions may  be  all  that  is  really  needed. 

And  first  respecting  the  things  our  friend  is  tired 
of  and  wants  to  get  away  from : 

I.  Fact  questions  about  what  is  in  the  book — 
memory  work — are  not  much  use  if  they  stop  with 
the  outline  of  the  story.  What  is  not  in  the  book 
may  be  more  important  than  what  is.  Why  did  the 
author  select  this  scene  for  narration  and  omit  that 
other,  intrinsically  (it  seems)  the  more  dramatically 
interesting  of  the  two?  See  The  Flirt,  by  Booth 
Tarkington,  where  a  double  murder  gets  only  a 
few  lines  and  a  small  boy's  doings  occupy  whole 
chapters. 


p2  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

2.  Scholarship  is  less  important  than  wide  read- 
ing, though  the  two  aren't  mutually  exclusive.  A 
wide  acquaintance  doesn't  preclude  a  few  profound- 
ly intimate  friendships.  Textual  study  has  spoiled 
Chaucer,  Shakespeare  and  Milton  for  most  of  us. 
Fifty  years  hence  Kipling  and  Masefield  will  be 
spoiled  in  the  same  way. 

3.  Time  serving  over  literature  is  a  waste  of 
time.  There  are  only  three  ways  to  teach  litera- 
ture. The  first  is  by  directing  students  to  books  for 
voluntary  reading — hundreds  of  books,  thousands. 
The  second  is  by  class  lectures — entertaining,  idea'd, 
anecdoted,  catholic  in  range  and  expository  in  char- 
acter. The  third  is  by  conversation — argumenta- 
tive at  times,  analytic  at  moments,  but  mostly  by 
way  of  exchanging  information  and  opinions. 

Study  books  as  you  study  people.  Mix  among 
them.  You  don't  take  notes  on  people  imless,  per- 
chance, in  a  diary.  Keep  a  diary  on  books  you 
read,  if  you  like,  but  don't  "take  notes."  Look  for 
those  qualities  in  books  that  you  look  for  in  people 
and  make  your  acquaintances  by  the  same  (per- 
haps unformulated)  rules.  To  read  snobbishly  is 
as  bad  as  to  practise  snobbery  among  your  fellows. 


22 

We  go  on  to  the  first  of  our  friend's  requests 
for  help.     It  is  a  scheme  for  "book  reporting"  for 


Book  "Reviewing"  93 

college  students  in  literature  classes  and  he  premises 
that  an  old  book  to  a  new  reader  is  news.  Of 
course  it  is. 

Let  the  student  take  up  a  book  that's  new  to  him 
and  read  it  by  himself,  afterward  writing  a  re- 
port of  it  to  be  read  to  the  class.  When  he  comes 
to  write  his  report  he  must  keep  in  the  forefront  of 
his  mind  this  one  thing: 

To  tell  the  others  accurately  enough  about  that 
book  so  that  each  one  of  them  will  know  whether 
or  not  he  wants  to  read  it. 

That  is  all  the  book  reporter  ever  tries  for. 
No  book  is  intended  for  everybody,  but  almost 
every  book  is  intended  for  somebody.  The  prob- 
lem of  the  book  reporter  is  to  find  the  reader. 

Comparison  may  help.  For  instance,  those  who 
enjoy  Milton's  pastoral  poetry  will  probably  enjoy 
the  long  poem  in  Robert  Nichols's  Ardours  and 
Endurances.  Those  who  like  Thackeray  will  like 
Mary  S.  Watts.  Those  who  like  Anna  Katharine 
Green  will  thank  you  for  sending  them  to  The 
Moonstone,  by  one  Wilkie  Collins. 

Most  stories  depend  upon  suspense  in  the  action 
for  their  main  effect.  You  must  not  "give  away" 
the  story  so  as  to  spoil  it  for  the  reader.  In  a  mys- 
tery story  you  may  state  the  mystery  and  appraise 
the  solution  or  even  characterize  it — ^but  you  mustn't 
reveal  it. 

Tell  'em  that  Mr.  Hergesheimer's  Java  Head  is 


94  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

an  atmospheric  marvel,  but  will  disappoint  many 
readers  who  put  action  first.  Tell  'em  that  Will- 
iam Allen  White  writes  (often)  banally,  but  so 
saturates  his  novel  with  his  own  bigheartedness 
that  he  makes  you  laugh  and  cry.  Tell  'em  the 
truth,  the  whole  truth  and  nothing  but  the  truth 
as  well  as  you  can  make  it  out — and  for  heaven's 
sake  ask  yourself  with  every  assertion:  *Ts  this 
a  fact  or  is  it  my  personal  opinion?"  And  a  fact, 
for  your  purpose,  will  be  an  opinion  in  which  a 
large  majority  of  readers  will  concur. 

23 

"Give  me  a  list  of  books  published  during  the 
last  ten  years  that  should  be  included  in  college 
English  laboratory  classes  in  literature.  I  want 
your  list.  I  have  my  own,  but  fear  it  is  too  aca- 
demic." 

The  following  list  is  an  offhand  attempt  to  com- 
ply with  this  request.  It  is  offered  merely  for  the 
suggestions  it  may  contain.  If  the  ten  year  restric- 
tion is  rigid  we  ask  pardon  for  such  titles  as  may 
be  a  little  older  than  that.     Strike  them  out. 

For  Kansans:  Willa  Sibert  Gather's  novels, 
O  Pioneers!  and  My  Antonia,  chronicling  people 
and  epochs  of  Kansas-Nebraska.  William  Allen 
White's  A  Certain  Rich  Man  and  In  the  Heart  of 


Book  "Reviewing"  95 

a  Fool,  less  for  their  Kansas-ness  than  for  their 
Americanism  and  humanity. 

For  Middle  Westerners:  Meredith  Nicholson's 
The  Valley  of  Democracy.  Zona  Gale's  Birth.  Carl 
Sandburg's  Chicago  Poems.  Edgar  Lee  Masters's 
Spoon  River  Anthology.  Vachel  Lindsay's  longer 
poems.  Mary  S.  Watts's  Nathan  Burke  and  Van 
Cleve:  His  Friends  and  His  Family.  Lord  Cham- 
wood's  life  of  Lincoln.  William  Dean  Howells's 
The  Leatherwood  God.  Booth  Tarkington's  The 
Conquest  of  Canaan  (first  published  about  fourteen 
years  ago)  and  The  Magnificent  Ambersons.  Gene 
Stratton-Porter's  A  Daughter  of  the  Land,  her 
Freckles  and  her  A  Girl  of  the  Limherlost.  One  or 
two  books  by  Harold  Bell  Wright.  The  Passing 
of  the  Frontier,  by  Emerson  Hough,  and  other 
books  in  the  Chronicles  of  America  series  published 
by  the  Yale  University  Press. 

For  Americans :  Mary  S.  Watts's  The  Rise  of 
Jennie  Gushing.  Owen  Wister's  The  Virginian  (if 
not  barred  under  the  ten  year  rule).  Booth  Tar- 
kington's The  Flirt.  Novels  with  American  settings 
by  Gertrude  Atherton  and  Stewart  Edward  White. 
Mary  Johnston's  The  Long  Roll  and  Cease  Firing. 
Willa  Sibert  Gather's  The  Song  of  the  Lark.  Edith 
Wharton's  Ethan  Frome.  Alice  Brown's  The  Pris- 
oner. Ellen  Glasgow's  The  Deliverance.  Corra 
Harris's  A  Circuit-Rider's  Wife.  All  of  O.  Henry. 
Margaret    Deland's    The    Iron    Woman.    Earlier 


96  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

novels  by  Winston  Churchill,  Ernest  Poole's  The 
Harbor.  Joseph  Hergesheimer's  The  Three  Block 
Pennys,  his  Gold  and  Iron  and  his  Java  Head.  His- 
torical books  by  Theodore  Roosevelt.  American 
biographies  too  numerous  to  mention.  From  Isola- 
tion to  Leadership:  A  Review  of  American  Foreign 
Policy  by  Latane  (published  by  the  educational  de- 
partment of  Doubleday,  Page  &  Company).  Es- 
says, such  as  those  of  Agnes  Repplier. 

Each  of  these  enumerations  presupposes  the 
books  already  named,  or  most  of  them.  Don't  treat 
them  as  pieces  of  literary  workmanship.  Many  of 
them  aren't.  Those  that  have  fine  literary  work- 
manship have  something  else,  too — and  it's  the 
other  thing,  or  things,  that  count.  Fine  art  in  a 
book  is  like  good  breeding  in  a  person,  a  passport, 
not  a  Magna  Charta.  "Manners  makyth  man"-^ 
yah! 

24 

We  are  also  asked : 

"What  are  some  of  the  things  which  should  en- 
ter into  the  training  of  teachers  of  high  school  En- 
glish?" 

We  reply : 

A  regard  for  literature,  not  as  it  reflects  life,  but 
as  it  moulds  lives.  A  profound  respect  for  an  au- 
thor who  can  find  100,000  readers,  a  respect  at  least 
equal  to  that  entertained  for  an  author  who  can 


Book  "Reviewing"  97 

write  superlatively  well.  For  instance :  Get  it  out 
of  your  head  that  you  can  afford  to  condescend 
toward  a  best  seller,  or  to  worship  such  a  writer 
as  Stevenson  for  his  sheer  craftsmanship. 

An  instinct  for  what  will  nourish  the  ordinary 
man  or  woman  as  keen  as  your  perception  of  what 
will  be  relished  by  the  fastidious  reader.  Don't 
insist  that  people  must  live  on  what  you,  or  any 
one  else,  declare  to  be  good  for  them.  It  is  not  for 
nothing  that  they  "don't  know  anything  about  lit- 
erature, but  know  what  they  like." 

A  confidence  in  the  greater  wisdom  of  the  great- 
est number.  Tarkington  got  it  right.  The  public 
wants  the  best  it  is  capable  of  understanding;  its 
understanding  may  not  be  the  highest  understand- 
ing, but  "the  writer  who  stoops  to  conquer  doesn't 
conquer."  Neither  does  the  writer  who  never  con- 
cedes anything.  The  public's  standard  can't  al- 
ways be  wrong;  the  private  standards  can't  always 
be  right. 

Arnold  Bennett  says,  quite  rightly,  that  the 
classics  are  made  and  kept  alive  by  "the  passionate 
few."  But  the  business  of  high  school  teachers  of 
English  is  not  with  the  passionate  few — who  will 
look  after  themselves — ^but  with  the  unimpassioned 
many.  You  can  lead  the  student  to  Mr.  Pope's 
Pierian  spring,  but  you  cannot  make  him  drink. 
Unless  you  can  show  him,  in  the  Missourian  sense, 
it's  all  off.    If  you  can't  tell  what  it  is  a  girl  likes 


98  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

in  Grace  S.  Richmond  how  are  you  going  to  show 
her  what  she'll  like  in  Dickens?  Unless  you  know 
what  it  is  that  "they"  get  out  of  these  books  they 
do  read  you  won't  be  able  to  bait  the  hook  with  the 
things  you  want  them  to  read.  Don't  you  think 
you've  got  a  lot  to  learn  yourself?  And  mightn't 
you  do  worse  than  sit  down  yourself  and  read  at- 
tentively, at  whatever  personal  cost,  some  of  the 
best  sellers? 

It  all  goes  back  to  the  size  of  the  teacher's  share 
of  our  common  humanity.  A  person  who  can't 
read  a  detective  story  for  the  sake  of  the  thrills 
has  no  business  teaching  high  school  English.  A 
person  who  is  a  literary  snob  is  unfit  to  teach  high 
school  English.  A  person  who  can't  sense  (better 
yet,  share)  the  common  feeling  about  a  popular 
writer  and  comprehend  the  basis  of  it  and  sympa- 
thize a  little  with  it  and  express  it  more  or  less  ar- 
ticulately in  everyday  speech  is  not  qualified  to  teach 
high  school  English. 

A  word  about  writing  "compositions"  in  high 
school  English  classes.  Make  'em  write  stories  in- 
stead. If  they  want  to  tackle  thumbnail  sketches 
or  abstracter  writing — little  essays — why,  let  'em. 
Abstractions  in  thought  and  writing  are  like  the 
ocean — it's  fatally  easy  to  get  beyond  your  depth, 


Book  "Reviewing"  99 

and  every  one  else's.  Read  what  Sir  Arthur 
Quiller-Couch  says  about  this  in  his  Studies  in  Lit- 
erature. Once  in  a  while  a  theologian  urges  us  to 
"get  back  to  the  Bible."  Well,  there  is  one  sense, 
at  least,  in  which  the  world  would  do  well  to  get 
back  to  the  Bible,  or  to  the  Old  Testament,  at  any 
rate.  As  Gardiner  points  out  in  his  The  Bible  as 
English  Literature,  it  was  the  fortune  or  misfortune 
of  ancient  Hebrew  that  it  had  no  abstractions. 
Everything  was  stated  in  terms  of  the  five  senses. 
There  was  no  such  word  as  "virtue";  you  said 
"sweet  smellingness"  or  "pleasant  tastingness"  or 
something  like  that.  And  everybody  knew  what 
you  meant.  Whereas  "virtue"  means  anything 
from  personal  chastity  to  a  general  meritoriousness 
that  nobody  can  define.  The  Greeks  introduced  ab- 
stract thinking  and  expression  and  some  Germans 
blighted  the  world  by  their  abuse. 

What  should  enter  into  the  training  of  high 
school  teachers  of  English?  Only  humbleness, 
sanity,  catholicity  of  viewpoint,  humor,  a  continual 
willingness  to  learn,  a  continuous  faith  in  the  peo- 
ple— and  undying  enthusiasm.  Only  these — and 
the  love  of  books. 


LITERARY    EDITORS 

BY    ONE    OF   THEM 


V 

LITERARY  EDITORS,   BY  ONE  OF  THEM 

THE  very  term  "literary  editor"  is  a  survival. 
It  is  meaningless,  but  we  continue  to  use  it 
because  no  better  designation  has  been  found,  just 
as  people  in  monarchical  countries  continue  to  speak 
of  "King  George"  or  "Queen  Victoria  of  Spain." 
Besides,  there  is  politeness  to  consider.  No  one 
wants  to  be  the  first  to  allude  publicly  and  truth- 
fully to  "Figurehead  George"  or  "Social  Leader 
Victoria." 

Literary  editors  who  are  literary  are  not  editors, 
and  literary  editors  who  are  editors  are  no  longer 
literary.  Of  old  there  were  scholarly,  sarcastic 
men  (delightful  fellows,  personally)  who  sat  in 
cubbyholes  and  read  unremittingly.  Afterward,  at 
night,  they  set  down  a  few  thoughtful,  biting  words 
about  what  they  had  read.  These  were  printed. 
Publishers  who  perused  them  felt  as  if  knives  had 
been  stuck  in  their  backs.  Booksellers  who  read 
them  looked  up  to  ask  each  other  pathetically :  "But 
what  does  it  mean?"  Book  readers  who  read  them 
resolved  that  the  publication  of  a  new  book  should 

103 


I04  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

be,  for  them,  the  signal  to  read  an  old  one.  It  was 
good  for  the  secondhand  trade. 

We've  changed  all  that,  or,  if  we  haven't,  we're 
going  to.  Take  a  chap  who  runs  what  is  called 
a  "book  section."  This  is  a  separate  section  or 
supplement  forming  part  of  a  daily  or  Sunday 
newspaper.  Its  pages  are  magazine  size — half  the 
size  of  newspaper  pages.  They  number  from  eight 
to  twenty-eight,  depending  on  the  season  and  the 
advertising.  The  essential  thing  to  realize  about 
such  a  section  is  that  it  requires  an  editor  to  run 
it 

It  does  not  require  a  literary  man,  or  woman,  at 
all.  The  editor  of  such  a  section  need  have  no 
special  education  in  the  arts  or  letters.  He  must 
have  judgment,  of  course,  and  if  he  has  not  some 
taste  for  literary  matters  he  may  not  enjoy  his 
work  as  he  will  if  he  has  that  taste.  But  high- 
browism  is  fatal. 

Can  our  editor  "review"  a  book?  Perhaps  not. 
It  is  no  matter.  Maybe  he  knows  a  good  review 
when  he  sees  it,  which  will  matter  a  good  deal. 
Maybe  he  can  get  capable  people  to  deal  with  the 
books  for  him.  Which  will  matter  more  than  any- 
thing else  on  earth  in  the  handling  of  his  book 
section. 

A  section  will  most  certainly  require,  to  run  it, 
a  man  who  can  tell  a  good  review  (another  word- 
survival)    and   who   can   get  good   reviewers.     It 


Literary  Editors  105 

will  require  a  man,  or  woman,  with  a  sharp,  clear 
and  very  broad  viewpoint.  Such  exist  What  do 
we  mean — viewpoint? 

The  right  conception,  it  seems  to  us,  starts  with 
the  proposition  that  a  new  book  is  news  (sometimes 
an  old  one  is  news  too)  and  should  be  dealt  with 
as  such.  Perhaps  we  are  dealing  only  with  a  state 
of  mind,  in  all  this,  but  states  of  mind  are  impor- 
tant. They  are  the  only  states  where  self-deter- 
mination is  a  sure  thing.     To  get  on : 

Your  literary  editor  is  like  unto  a  city  editor,  an 
individual  whose  desk  is  usually  not  so  far  away 
but  that  you  can  study  him  in  his  habitat.  The  city 
editor  tries  to  distinguish  the  big  news  from  the 
little  news.  The  literary  editor  will  wisely  do  the 
same.  What  is  big  news  in  the  world  of  books? 
Well,  a  book  that  appears  destined  to  be  read  as 
widely  fifty  years  hence  as  it  is  to-day  on  publica- 
tion is  big  news.  And  a  book  that  will  be  read 
immediately  by  100,000  people  is  bigger  news. 
People  who  talk  about  news  often  overlook  the 
ephemeral  side  of  it.  Much  of  the  newsiness  and 
importance  of  news  resides  in  its  transiency.  What 
is  news  to-day  isn't  news  to-morrow.  But  to-day 
100,000  people,  more  or  less,  will  want  to  know 
about  it. 

Illustration :  Two  events  happen  on  the  same  day. 
One  of  them  will  be  noted  carefully  in  histories 
written  fifty  years  hence,  but  it  affects,  and  inter- 


io6  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ests,  at  the  hour  of  its  occurrence  very  few  persons. 
Of  course  it  is  news,  but  there  may  easily,  at  that 
hour,  be  much  bigger.  For  another  event  occur- 
ring on  that  same  day,  though  of  a  character  which 
will  make  it  forgotten  fifty  years  later,  at  once  and 
directly  affects  the  lives  of  the  hundred  thousand. 

Parallel :  Two  books  are  published  on  the  same 
day.  One  of  them  will  be  dissected  fifty  years 
later  by  the  H.  W.  Boyntons  and  Wilson  Folletts 
of  that  time.  But  the  number  of  persons  who  will 
read  it  within  the  twelvemonth  of  its  birth  is  small 
— in  the  hundreds.  The  other  book  will  be  out  of 
print  and  unremembered  in  five  years.  But  within 
six  months  of  its  publication  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands will  read  it.  Among  those  hundreds  of 
thousands  there  will  be  hundreds,  and  maybe  thou- 
sands, whose  thoughts,  ideas,  opinions  will  be  seri- 
ously modified  and  in  some  cases  lastingly  modified 
— whose  very  lives  may  change  trend  as  a  result  of 
reading  that  book. 

No  need  to  ask  which  event  and  which  book  is 
the  bigger  news.  News  is  not  the  judgment  of 
posterity  on  a  book  or  event.  News  is  not  even 
the  sum  total  of  the  effects  of  an  event  or  a  book 
on  human  society.  News  is  the  immediate  impor- 
tance, or  interest,  of  an  event  or  a  book  to  the 
greatest  number  of  people. 

Eleanor  H.  Porter  writes  a  new  story.  One  in 
every  thousand  persons  in  the  United  States,  or 


Literary  Editors  107 


perhaps  more,  wants  to  know  about  it,  and  at  once. 
Isidor  MacDougal  (as  Frank  M.  O'Brien  would 
say)  writes  a  literary  masterpiece.  Not  one  per- 
son in  500,000  cares,  or  would  care  even  if  the  sub- 
ject matter  were  made  comprehensible  to  him.  The 
oldtime  "reviewer"  would  write  three  solid  columns 
about  Isidor  MacDougal's  work.  The  present-day 
Hterary  editor  puts  it  in  competent  hands  for  a 
simplified  description  to  be  printed  later ;  and  mean- 
while he  slaps  Mrs.  Porter's  novel  on  his  front 
page. 

The  troubles  of  a  literary  editor  are  the  troubles 
of  his  friend  up  the  aisle,  the  city  editor.  The 
worst  of  them  is  the  occasional  and  inevitable  error 
in  giving  out  the  assignment.  All  his  reporters  are 
good  book  reporters,  but  like  the  people  on  the 
city  editor's  staff  they  have  usually  their  limitations, 
whether  temperamental  or  knowledgable.  Every 
once  in  a  while  the  city  editor  sends  to  cover  a  fire 
a  reporter  who  does  speechified  dinners  beautifully 
but  who  has  no  sympathy  with  fires,  who  can't  get 
through  the  fire  lines,  who  writes  that  the  fire 
"broke  out"  and  burns  up  more  words  misdescrib- 
ing  the  facts  than  the  copyreader  can  extinguish 
with  blue  air  and  blue  pencil.  Just  so  it  will  hap- 
pen in  the  best  regulated  literary  editor's  sanctum 
that,  now  and  then,  the  editor  will  give  the  wrong 
book  to  the  right  man.     Then  he  learns  how  un- 


io8  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

reasonable  an  author  can  be,  if  he  doesn't  know 
already  from  the  confidences  of  publishers. 

The  literary  editor's  point  of  view,  we  believe, 
must  be  that  so  well  expressed  by  Robert  Cortes 
Holliday  in  the  essay  on  That  Rcznewer  "Cuss"  in 
the  book  Walking -Stick  Papers.  Few  books  that 
get  published  by  established  publishing  houses  are 
so  poor  or  so  circumscribed  as  not  to  appeal  to  a 
body  of  readers  somewhere,  however  small  or  scat- 
tered. The  function  of  the  book  reporter  is  tran- 
scendently  to  find  a  book's  waiting  audience.  If 
he  can  incidentally  warn  off  those  who  don't  belong 
to  that  audience,  so  much  the  better.  That's  a 
harder  thing  to  do,  of  course. 


The  first  requisite  in  a  good  book  section  is  that 
it  shall  be  interesting.  As  regards  the  news  of  new 
books,  this  is  not  difficult  where  book  reporters, 
with  the  reporter's  attitude,  are  on  the  job.  Re- 
porter's stories  are  sometimes  badly  written,  but 
they  are  seldom  dull.  New  books  described  by  per- 
sons who  have  it  firmly  lodged  in  their  noodles  that 
they  are  "reviewing"  the  books,  fare  badly.  The 
reviewer-obsession  manifests  itself  in  different 
ways.  Sometimes  the  new  book  is  made  to  march 
past  the  reviewer  in  column  of  squads,  deploying 
at  page  247  into  skirmish   formation  and  coming 


Literary  Editors  109 


at  page  431  into  company  front.  Very  fine,  but 
the  reader  wants  to  see  them  in  the  trenches,  or, 
headed  by  the  author  uttering  inspiriting  yells,  go- 
ing over  the  top.  On  other  occasions  the  reviewer 
assumes  the  so-called  judicial  attitude,  the  true 
inwardness  of  which  William  Schwenk  Gilbert  was 
perhaps  the  first  to  appreciate,  with  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  Lewis  Carroll.  Then  doth  our  reviewer 
tell  us  what  will  be  famous  a  century  hence.  Much 
we  care  what  will  be  famous  a  century  hence. 
What  bothers  us  is  what  we  shall  read  to-morrow. 
Of  course  it  may  happen  to  be  one  and  the  same 
book.     Very  well  then,  why  not  say  so? 

The  main  interest  of  the  book  section  is  served 
by  getting  crackajack  book  reporters.  They  will 
suffice  for  the  people  who  read  the  section  because 
they  are  interested  in  books.  If  the  literary  editor 
stops  there,  however,  he  might  as  well  never  have 
started.  These  people  would  read  the  book  section 
anyway,  unless  it  were  filled  throughout  with  ab- 
solutely unreadable  matter,  as  has  been  known  to 
happen.  Even  then  they  would  doubtless  scan  the 
advertisements.  At  least,  that  is  the  theory  on 
which  publishers  hopefully  proceed.  There  are 
book  sections  where  the  contributors  always  specify 
that  their  articles  shall  have  a  position  next  to  ad- 
vertising matter. 

No,  the  literary  editor  must  interest  people  who 
do  not  especially  care  about  books  as  such.     He 


no  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

can  do  it  only  by  convincing  them  that  books  are 
just  as  full  of  life  and  just  as  much  a  part  of  a 
nonnal  scheme  of  life  as  movies,  or  magazine  cut- 
outs, or  buying  things  on  the  instalment  plan. 
Many  a  plain  person  has  been  led  to  read  books  by 
the  fact  that  books  are  sometimes  sold  for  instal- 
ment payments.  Anything  so  sold,  tlie  ordinary 
person  at  once  realizes,  must  be  something  which 
will  fit  into  his  scheme  of  existence.  Acting  on  an 
instinct  so  old  that  its  origin  is  shrouded  in  the 
mists  of  antiquity,  the  ordinary  person  pays  the  in- 
stalments. As  a  result,  books  are  delivered  at  his 
residence.  At  first  he  is  frightened.  But  he  who 
looks  and  runs  away  may  live  to  read  another  day. 
And  from  living  to  read  it  is  but  a  step  to  reading 
to  live. 

Now  one  way  to  interest  people  who  don't  care 
about  books  for  books'  sake  is  to  get  up  attractive 
pages,  with  pleasant  or  enticing  headlines,  with  pic- 
tures, with  jokes  in  the  comers  of  'em,  with  some 
new  and  original  and  not-hitherto-published  matter 
in  them,  with  poetry  (all  kinds),  with  large  type, 
with  signed  articles  so  that  the  reader  can  know 
who  wrote  it  and  like  or  hate  him  with  the  neces- 
sary personal  tag.  But  these  things  aren't  literary, 
at  all.  They  are  just  plain  human  and  fall  in  the 
field  of  action  of  every  editor  alive — though  of 
course  editors  who  are  dead  are  exempt  from  deal- 
ing with  them.     That  is  why  a  literary  editor  has 


Literary  Editors  iii 

no  need  to  be  literary  and,  indeed,  had  better  not 
be  if  it  is  going  to  prevent  his  being  human. 

We  have  been  talking  about  the  literary  editor 
of  a  book  section.  There  are  not  many  book  sec- 
tions in  this  country.  There  are  hundreds  of  book 
pages — half -pages  and  whole  pages  and  double 
pages.  The  word  "technique"  is  a  loathsome  thing 
and  really  without  any  significance  in  this  connec- 
tion, inasmuch  as  there  is  no  particular  way  of  do- 
ing the  news  of  books  well,  and  certainly  no  one 
way  of  doing  it  that  is  invariably  better  than  any 
other.  But  for  convenience  we  may  permit  our- 
selves to  use  the  word  "technique"  for  a  moment; 
and,  permission  granted,  we  will  merely  say  that 
the  technique  of  a  book  page  or  pages  is  entirely 
different  from  the  technique  of  a  book  section — 
if  you  know  what  we  mean. 

Clarified  (we  hope)  it  comes  down  to  this,  that 
things  which  a  fellow  would  attempt  in  a  book  sec- 
tion he  would  not  essay  in  a  book  page  or  double 
page.  Conversely,  things  that  will  make  a  page 
successful  may  be  out  of  place  in  a  section.  It  is 
by  no  means  wholly  a  matter  of  newspaper  make- 
up, though  there  is  that  to  it,  too.  But  a  man  with 
a  book  section,  though  not  necessarily  more  ambi- 
tious, is  otherwisely  so.  For  one  thing,  he  expects 
to  turn  his  reporters  loose  on  more  books  than  his 
colleague  who  has  only  a  page  or  so  to  turn  around 
in.     For  another,  he  will  probably  want  to  print  a 


112  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

careful  Hst  of  all  books  he  receives,  of  whatever 
sort,  with  a  description  of  each  as  adequate  as  he 
can  contrive  in  from  twenty  to  fifty  words,  plus 
title,  author,  place  of  publication,  publisher  and 
price.  Such  lists  are  scanned  by  publishers,  book- 
sellers, librarians,  readers  in  search  of  books  on  spe- 
cial subjects — by  pretty  nearly  everybody  who  reads 
the  section  at  all.  Even  the  rather  prosaic  quality 
of  such  a  list  has  its  value.  A  woman  down  in 
Texas  writes  to  the  literary  editor  that  there  is  too 
much  conscious  cleverness  in  lots  of  the  stuff  he 
prints,  "but  the  lists  of  books  are  deHghtful"! 
There  you  are.  In  editing  a  book  section  you  must 
be  all  things  to  all  women. 

The  fellow  with  a  page  or  two  has  quite  other 
preoccupations.  Where's  a  photo,  or  a  cartoon? 
Must  have  a  headline  to  break  the  solidity  of  this 
close-packed  column  of  print.  How  about  a  funny 
column?  That  gifted  person,  Heywood  Broun, 
taking  charge  of  the  book  pages  of  the  New  York 
Tribune,  announces  that  he  is  in  favor  of  anything 
that  will  make  book  reviewing  exciting.  Nothing 
can  make  book  reviewing  exciting  except  book  re- 
porting and  the  books  themselves;  but  if  Broun  is 
looking  for  excitement  he  will  find  it  while  fiUing 
the  role  of  a  literary  editor.  Before  long  he  will 
learn  that  everybody  in  the  world  who  is  not  the 
author  of  a  book  wants  to  review  books — and  some 
who  are  authors  are  willing  to  double  in  both  parts. 


Literary  Editors  113 

Also,  a  considerable  number  of  books  are  published 
annually  in  these  still  United  States  and  a  consider- 
able percentage  of  those  published  find  their  way 
to  the  literary  editor.  It  is  no  joke  to  receive,  list 
with  descriptions  and  sort  out  for  assignment  or 
non-assignment  an  average  of  1,500  volumes  a 
year,  nor  to  assign  to  your  book  reporters,  with  as 
much  infallibility  in  choosing  the  reporter  as  pos- 
sible, perhaps  half  of  the  1,500.  Likewise  there 
are  assignments  which  several  reporters  want,  ■  a 
single  book  bespoken  by  four  persons,  maybe;  and 
there  are  book  assignments  that  are  received  with 
horror  or  sometimes  with  unflinching  bravery  by 
the  good  soldier.  To  hand  a  man,  for  instance, 
the  extremely  thick  two- volume  History  of  Labour 
in  the  United  States  by  Professor  Commons  and  his 
associates  is  like  pinning  a  decoration  on  him  for 
limitless  valor  under  fire — only  the  decoration  bears 
a  strong  resemblance  to  the  Iron  Cross. 

3 

Advertising? 

Newspapers  depend  upon  advertising  for  their 
existence,  let  alone  their  profits,  in  most  instances. 
Of  course,  if  there  were  no  such  things  as  advertise- 
ments we  should  still  have  newspapers.  The  news 
must  be  had.     Presumably   people  would   simply 


114  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

pay  more  for  it,  or  pay  as  much  in  a  more  direct 
way. 

What  is  true  of  newspapers  is  true  of  parts  of 
newspapers.  The  fact  that  a  new  book  is  news, 
and,  as  such,  a  thing  that  must  more  or  less  widely 
but  indispensably  be  reported,  is  attested  by  the 
maintenance  of  book  columns  and  pages  in  many 
newspapers  where  book  advertising  there  is  none. 
The  people  who  read  the  Boston  Evening  Tran- 
script, for  example,  would  hardly  endure  the  aboli- 
tion of  its  book  pages  whether  publishers  used  them 
to  advertise  in  or  not. 

At  the  same  time  the  publisher  finds,  and  can 
find,  no  better  medium  than  a  good  live  book  page 
or  book  section ;  nor  can  he  find  any  other  medium, 
nor  can  any  other  medium  be  created,  in  which  his 
advertising  will  reach  his  full  audience.  "The 
trade"  reads  the  excellent  Publishers'  Weekly,  H- 
brarians  have  the  journal  of  the  American  Library 
Association,  readers  have  the  newspapers  and  mag- 
azines of  general  circulation  on  which  they  rely  for 
the  news  of  new  books.  But  the  good  book  page 
or  book  section  reaches  all  these  groups.  Publish- 
ers, authors,  booksellers,  librarians,  book  buyers — 
all  read  it.  And  if  it  is  really  good  it  spreads  the 
book  reading  habit.  Even  a  bookshop  seldom  does 
that — we  have  one  exception  in  mind,  pretty  well 
known.  People  do  not,  ordinarily,  read  in  a  book- 
shop. 


Literary  Editors  115 

Of  course  a  literary  editor  who  has  any  regard 
for  the  vitality  of  his  page  or  section  is  interested 
in  book  advertising.  There's  something  wrong 
with  him  if  he  isn't.  If  he  isn't  he  doesn't  measure 
up  to  his  job,  which  is  to  get  people  to  read  books 
and  find  their  way  about  among  them.  A  book 
page  or  a  book  section  without  advertising  is  no 
more  satisfactory  than  a  man  or  a  woman  without 
a  sense  of  the  value  of  money.  It  looks  lopsided 
and  it  is  lopsided.  Readers  resent  it,  and  rightly. 
It's  a  beautiful  fagade,  but  the  side  view  is  disap- 
pointing. 

The  interest  the  literary  editor  takes  in  book 
advertising  need  no  more  be  limited  than  the  in- 
terest he  takes  in  the  growth  or  improvement  of 
any  other  feature  of  his  page  or  section.  It  has 
and  can  have  no  relation  to  his  editorial  or  news 
policy.  The  moment  such  a  thing  is  true  his  use- 
fulness is  ended.  An  alliance  between  the  pen  and 
the  pocketbook  is  known  the  moment  it  is  made 
and  is  transparent  the  moment  it  takes  effect  in 
print.  A  literary  editor  may  resent,  and  keenly, 
as  an  editor,  the  fact  that  Bing,  Bang  &  Company 
do  not  advertise  their  books  in  his  domain.  He  is 
quite  right  to  feel  strongly  about  it.  It  has  nothing 
to  do  with  his  handling  of  the  Bing  Bang  books. 
That  is  determined  by  their  news  value  alone.  He 
may  give  the  Bing  Bang  best  seller  a  front  page 
review  and  at  the  same  time  decline  to  meet  Mr. 


ii6  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Bing  or  lunch  with  Mr.  Bang.  And  he  will  be  en- 
tirely honest  and  justified  in  his  course,  both  ways. 
Puff  &  Boom  advertise  like  thunder.  The  Hterary 
editor  likes  them  both  immensely,  or,  at  least,  he 
appreciates  their  good  judgment  (necessarily  it 
seems  good  to  him  in  his  role  as  editor  of  the  pages 
they  use).  But  Puff  &  Boom's  books  are  one-stick 
stories.     Well,  it's  up  to  Puff  &  Boom,  isn't  it? 

Oh,  well,  first  and  last  there's  a  lot  to  being  a 
literary  editor,  new  style.  But  first  and  last  there's 
a  lot  to  being  a  human.  Any  one  who  can  be  hu- 
man successfully  can  do  the  far  lesser  thing  much 
better  than  any  literary  editor  has  yet  done  it. 


WHAT    EVERY    PUBLISHER 
KNOWS 


VI 

WHAT  EVERY   PUBLISHER   KNOWS 

A  BIG  subject?  Not  necessarily.  Discussed  by 
an  authority  ?  No,  indeed.  On  the  contrary, 
about  to  be  written  upon  by  an  amateur  recording 
impressions  extending  a  little  over  a  year  but  formed 
in  several  relationships — as  a  "literary  editor,"  as  an 
author  and,  involuntarily,  as  an  author's  agent — ^but 
all  friendly.  Also,  perhaps,  as  a  pretty  regular 
reader  of  publishers'  products.  What  will  first  ap- 
pear as  vastness  in  the  subject  will  shrink  on  a 
moment's  examination.  For  our  title  is  concerned 
only  with  what  every  publisher  knows.  A  common 
piece  of  knowledge;  or  if  not,  after  all,  very  "com- 
mon," at  least  commonly  held — by  book  publishers. 
To  state  the  main  conclusion  first :  The  one 
thing  that  every  publisher  knows,  so  far  as  a  hum- 
ble experience  can  deduce,  is  that  what  is  called 
"general"  publishing — meaning  fiction  and  other 
books  of  general  appeal — is  a  highly  speculative  en- 
terprise and  hardly  a  business  at  all.  The  clearest 
analogy  seems  to  be  with  the  theatrical  business. 
Producing  books  and  producing  plays  is  terrifyingly 
alike.     Full  of  risks.     Requiring,  unless  genius  is 

119 


I20  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

manifested,  considerable  money  capital.  Likely  to 
make,  and  far  more  likely  to  lose,  small  fortunes 
overnight.  .  ,  .  Fatally  fascinating.  More  an  art 
than  an  organization  but  usually  requiring  an  organ- 
ization for  the  exhibition  of  the  most  brilliant  art 
— like  opera.  A  habit  comparable  with  hasheesh. 
Heart-lifting — and  headachy.  'Twas  the  night  be- 
fore publication  and  all  through  the  house  not  a 
creature  was  stirring,  not  even  a  stenographer.  The 
day  dawned  bright  and  clear  and  a  re-order  for  fifty 
more  copies  came  in  the  afternoon  mail.  .  .  .  Ab- 
sentmindedly,  the  publisher-bridegroom  pulled  a 
contract  instead  of  the  wedding  ring  from  his  pocket. 
"With  this  royalty  I  thee  wed,"  he  murmured.  And 
so  she  was  published  and  they  lived  happily  ever 
after  until  she  left  him  because  he  did  not  clothe 
the  children  suitably,  using  green  cloth  with  purple 
stamping. 


A  fine  old  publishing  house  once  went  back  over 
the  record  of  about  1,200  published  books.  This 
was  a  rather  conservative  firm,  as  little  of  a  gambler 
as  possible ;  its  books  had  placed  it,  in  every  respect, 
in  the  first  rank  of  publishing  houses. 

Of  the  1,200  books  just  one  in  ten  had  made  any 
sizable  amount  of  money.  The  remaining  1,080 
had  either  lost  money,  broken  even,  or  made  sums 
smaller  than  the  interest  on  the  money  tied  up  in 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  121 

them.  Most  of  the  120  profitable  books  had  been 
highly  profitable;  it  will  not  surprise  you  to  learn 
this  when  you  reflect  that  these  lucrative  books  had 
each  to  foot  the  bill,  more  or  less,  for  nine  others. 
So  much  for  the  analysis  of  figures.  But  what  lay 
behind  the  figures?  In  some  cases  it  was  possible 
to  tell  why  a  particular  book  had  sold.  More  often 
it  wasn't.  ...  Is  this  a  business? 


Thorwald  Alembert  Jenkinson  has  a  book  pub- 
lished. It's  not  a  bad  book,  either;  very  good  novel, 
as  a  matter  of  fact.  Sales  rather  poor.  Mr.  Jen- 
kinson's  publisher  takes  his  next  book  with  a  nat- 
ural reluctance,  buoyed  up  by  the  certitude  that  this 
is  a  better  story  and  has  in  it  elements  that  prom- 
ise popularity.  The  publisher's  salesman  goes  on 
the  road.  In  Dodge  City,  Iowa,  let  us  say,  he  enters 
a  bookseller's  and  begins  to  talk  the  new  Jenkinson 
novel.  At  the  sound  of  his  voice  and  the  sight  of 
the  dummy  the  bookseller  lifts  repelling  hands  and 
backs  away  in  horror, 

"Stock  that?"  asks  the  bookseller  rhetorically. 
"Not  on  your  Hfe!  Why,"  with  a  gesture  toward 
one  shelf,  "there's  his  first  book.  Twenty  copies 
and  only  two  sold !" 

The  new  Jenkinson  novel  has  a  wretched  advance 
sale.     Readers,  not  seeing  it  in  the  bookshops,  may 


122  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

yet  call  for  it  when  they  read  a  review — not  neces- 
sarily a  favorable  account — or  when  they  see  it  ad- 
vertised. If  Mr.  Jenkinson  wrote  histories  or  bi- 
ographies the  bookseller's  wholly  human  attitude 
would  not  much  matter.  But  a  novel  is  different. 
The  customer  wanting  Jenkinson's  History  of 
France  would  order  it  or  go  elsewhere,  most  likely. 
The  customer  wanting  Jenkinson's  new  novel  is 
quite  often  content  with  Tarkington's  instead. 

When  you  go  to  the  ticket  agency  to  get  seats  at 
a  Broadway  show  and  find  they  have  none  left  for 
Whoop  'Er  Up  you  grumble,  and  then  buy  seats  at 
Let's  All  Go.  Not  that  you  really  care.  Not  that 
any  one  really  cares.  The  man  who  produced 
Whoop  'Er  Up  is  also  the  producer  of  Let's  All  Go, 
both  theatres  are  owned  by  a  single  group,  the  li- 
brettists are  one  and  the  same  and  the  music  of  both 
is  equally  bad,  proceeding  from  an  identical  source. 
Even  the  stagehands  work  interchangeably  on  a 
strict  union  scale.  But  Mr.  Jenkinson  did  not  write 
Tarkington's  novel,  the  two  bo6ks  are  published 
by  firms  that  have  not  a  dollar  in  common,  and  only 
the  bookseller  can  preserve  an  evatanguayan  indif- 
ference over  your  choice. 


The  publisher's  salesman  comes  to  the  booksell- 
er's lair  equipped  with  dummies.     These  show  the 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  123 

book's  exterior,  its  size,  thickness,  paper,  binding 
and  (very  important)  its  jacket.  Within  the 
dummy  are  blank  pages,  or  perhaps  the  first  twenty 
pages  of  the  book  printed  over  and  over  to  give  the 
volume  requisite  thickness.  The  bookseller  may 
read  these  twenty  pages.  If  the  author  has  got 
plenty  of  action  into  them  the  bookseller  is  favor- 
ably impressed.  Mainly  he  depends  for  his  idea  of 
the  book  upon  what  the  salesman  and  the  publisher's 
catalogue  tells  him.  He  has  to.  He  can't  read  'em  all. 
Sometimes  the  salesman  can  illustrate  his  re- 
marks. Henry  Leverage  wrote  an  ingenious  story 
called  Whispering  Wires  in  which  the  explanation 
of  a  mysterious  murder  depended  upon  the  tele- 
phone, converted  by  a  too-gifted  electrician  into  a 
single-shot  pistol.  Offering  the  story  to  the  book- 
sellers, Harry  Apeler  carried  parts  of  a  telephone 
receiver  about  the  country  with  him,  unscrewing 
and  screwing  on  again  the  delicate  disc  that  you  put 
against  your  ear  and  showing  how  the  deed  was 
done. 

5 

The  bookseller,  like  every  one  else,  goes  by  ex- 
perience. It  is,  or  has  been,  his  experience  that 
collections  of  short  stories  do  not  sell  well.  And 
this  is  true  despite  O.  Henry,  Fannie  Hurst  and 
Edna  Ferber.  It  is  so  true  that  publishers  shy  at 
short  story  volumes.     Where  there  is  a  name  that 


124  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

will  command  attention — Alice  Brown,  Theodore 
Dreiser — or  where  a  special  appeal  is  possible,  as  in 
Edward  J.  O'Brien's  The  Best  Short  Stories  of 
19 1-,  books  made  up  of  short  tales  may  sell.  But 
there  are  depressing  precedents. 

In  his  interesting  article  on  The  Publishing  Busi- 
ness, appearing  in  19 16  in  the  Publishers'  Weekly 
and  since  reprinted  as  a  booklet,  Temple  Scott  cites 
Henri  Bergson's  Creative  Evolution  as  a  modem 
instance  of  a  special  sort  of  book  finding  its  own 
very  special,  but  surprisingly  large,  public,  "Nine 
booksellers  out  of  ten  'passed'  it  when  the  traveller 
brought  it  round,"  observes  Mr.  Scott.  "Fortu- 
nately, for  the  publisher,  the  press  acted  the  part  of 
the  expert,  and  public  attention  was  secured."  Was 
the  bookseller  to  blame?  Most  decidedly  not. 
Creative  Evolution  is  nothing  to  tie  up  your  money 
in  on  a  dim  chance  that  somewhere  an  enthusiastic 
audience  waits  for  the  Bergsonian  gospel. 

Mr.  Scott's  article,  which  is  inconclusive,  in  our 
opinion,  points  out  clearly  that  as  no  two  books  are 
like  each  other  no  two  books  are  really  the  same  ar- 
ticle. Much  fiction,  to  be  sure,  is  of  a  single  stamp ; 
many  books,  and  here  we  are  by  no  means  limited  to 
fiction,  have  whatever  unity  comes  from  the  author- 
ship of  a  single  hand.  This  unity  may  exist,  elu- 
sively,  as  in  the  stories  of  Joseph  Conrad,  or  may 
be  confined  almost  wholly  to  the  presence  of  the 
same  name  on  two  titlepages,  as  in  the  fact  that 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  125 

The  Virginian  and  The  Pentecost  of  Calamity  are 
both  the  work  of  Owen  Wister. 

No!  Two  books  are  most  often  and  emphat- 
ically not  the  same  article.  Mr.  Scott  is  wholly 
right  when  he  pK)ints  out  every  book  should  have  ad- 
vertising, or  other  attention,  peculiar  to  itself.  A 
method  of  reporting  one  book  will  not  do  for  an- 
other, any  more  than  a  publisher's  circular  describ- 
ing one  book  will  do  to  describe  a  second.  The  art 
of  reporting  books  or  other  news,  like  the  art  of  ad- 
vertising books  or  other  commodities,  is  one  of  end- 
less differentiation.  In  the  absence  of  real  orig- 
inality, freshness  and  ideas,  both  objects  go  un- 
achieved or  else  are  achieved  by  speciousness,  not  to 
say  guile.  You,  for  example,  do  not  really  believe 
that  by  reading  Hannibal  Halcombe's  How  to  Heap 
Up  Happiness  you  will  be  able  to  acquire  the  equiv- 
alent of  a  college  education  in  52  weeks.  But  some- 
where in  How  to  Heap  Up  Happiness  Mr.  Halcombe 
tells  how  he  made  money  or  how  he  learned  to  en- 
joy pictures  on  magazine  covers  or  a  happy  solution 
of  his  unoriginal  domestic  troubles — any  one  of 
which  you  may  crave  to  know  and  honest  informa- 
tion of  which  will  probably  send  you  after  the  book. 


At  this  point  in  the  discussion  of  our  subject  we 
have  had  the  incredible  folly  to  look  back  at  our 


126  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

outline.  Yes,  there  is  an  outline — or  a  thing  of 
shreds  and  patches  which  once  went  by  that  descrip- 
tion. What,  you  will  say,  wrecked  so  soon,  after 
a  mere  introduction  of  1,500  words  or  so?  Cer- 
tainly. Outlines  are  to  writers  what  architects' 
plans  are  to  builders,  or  what  red  rags  are  supposed 
to  be  to  bulls.  Or,  as  the  proverbial  (our  favorite 
adjective)  chaff  before  the  wind.  Our  outline  says 
that  the  subject  of  selling  books  should  be  subdivi- 
sion (c)  under  division  i  of  the  three  partitions  of 
our  subject.  All  Gaul  and  Poland  are  not  the  only 
objects  divided  in  three  parts.  Every  serious  sub- 
ject is,  likewise. 

Never  mind.  We  shall  have  to  struggle  along  as 
best  we  can.  We  have  been  talking  about  selling 
books,  or  what  every  publisher  knows  in  regard  to 
it.  Well,  then,  every  publisher  knows  that  selling 
books  as  it  has  mainly  to  be  conducted  under  pres- 
ent conditions,  is  just  as  much  a  matter  of  merchan- 
dising as  selling  bonnets,  bathrobes  and  birdseed. 
But  this  is  one  of  the  things  that  people  outside  the 
publishing  and  bookselling  businesses  seldom  grasp. 
A  cultural  air,  for  them,  invests  the  book  business. 
The  curse  of  the  genteel  hangs  about  it.  It  is  al- 
most professional,  like  medicine  and  baseball.  It 
has  an  odor,  like  sanctity.  .  .  .  All  wrong. 

Bonnets,  bathrobes,  birdseed,  books.  All  are 
saleable  if  you  go  about  it  right.  And  how  is  that? 
you  ask. 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  127 

The  best  way  to  sell  bonnets  is  to  lay  a  great 
foundational  demand  for  headgear.  The  best  way 
to  sell  bathrobes  is  to  encourage  bathing.  The  best 
way  to  sell  birdseed  is  to  put  a  canary  in  every  home. 
It  might  be  supposed  that  the  best  way  to  sell  books 
would  be  to  get  people  to  read.  Yes,  it  might  be 
far  more  valuable  in  the  end  to  stimulate  and  spread 
the  reading  habit  than  to  try  to  sell  100,000  copies 
of  any  particular  book. 

Of  course  every  publisher  knows  this  and  of 
course  all  the  publishers,  associating  themselves  for 
the  promotion  of  a  common  cause  not  inconceivably 
allied  to  the  general  welfare,  spend  time  and  money 
in  the  effort  to  make  readers — not  of  Mrs.  Halcyon 
Hunter's  Love  Has  Wings  or  Mr.  Caspar  Car- 
touche's Martin  the  Magnificent,  but  of  books,  just 
good  books  of  any  sort  soever.     Yes,  of  course.  .  .  . 

This  would  be — beg  pardon,  is — the  thing  that 
actually  and  immediately  as  well  as  ultimately 
counts :  Let  us  get  people  to  read,  to  like  to  read, 
to  enjoy  reading,  and  they  will,  sooner  or  later,  read 
books.  Sooner  or  later  they'll  become  book  readers 
and  book  buyers.  Sooner  or  later  books  will  sell  as 
well  as  automobiles.  .  .  . 

On  the  merely  technical  side  of  bookselling,  on 
the  immediate  problem  of  selling  particular  new 
novels,  collections  of  short  stories,  histories,  books 
of  verse,  and  all  the  rest,  the  publishers  have,  col- 
lectively at  least,  not  much  to  learn  from  their  fel- 


128  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

low  merchants  with  the  bonnets,  bathrobes  and 
birdseed.  The  mechanism  of  merchandising  is  so 
highly  developed  in  America  that  many  of  the  meth- 
ods resemble  the  interchangeable  parts  of  standard- 
ized manufactures  everywhere.  Suppose  we  have  a 
look  at  these  methods. 


The  lesson  of  flexibility  has  been  fully  mastered 
by  at  least  two  American  publishing  houses.  With 
their  very  large  lists  of  new  books  they  contrive  to 
avoid,  as  much  as  possible,  fixed  publication  dates. 
While  their  rivals  are  pinning  themselves  fast  six 
months  ahead,  these  publishers  are  moving  largely 
but  conditionally  six  and  nine  months  ahead,  and 
less  largely  but  with  swift  certainty  three  months, 
two  months,  even  one  month  from  the  passing  mo- 
ment. And  they  are  absolutely  right  and  profit  by 
their  rightness.  For  this  reason:  Everything  that 
is  printed  has  in  it  an  element  of  that  timeliness,  that 
ephemerality  if  you  like  but  also  that  widening  rip- 
ple of  human  interest  which  is  the  unique  essence  of 
what  we  call  "news."  This  quahty  is  present,  in  a 
perceptible  amount,  even  in  the  most  serious  sort  of 
printed  matter.  Let  us  take,  as  an  example,  Dar- 
win's Origin  of  Species.  Oh !  exclaims  the  reader, 
there  surely  is  a  book  with  no  ephemerality  about 
itl     No?    But  there  was  an  immense  quantity  of 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  129 

just  that  in  its  publication.  It  came  at  the  right 
hour.  Fifty  years  earlier  it  would  have  gone  un- 
noticed. To-day  it  is  transcended  by  a  body  of 
biological  knowledge  that  Darwin  knew  not. 

Fifty  years,  one  way  or  the  other,  would  have 
made  a  vast  difference  in  the  reception,  the  import, 
the  influence  of  even  so  epochal  a  book  as  The 
Origin  of  Species.  Now  a  little  reflection  will  show 
that,  in  the  case  of  lesser  books,  the  matter  of  time 
is  far  more  sharply  important.  Darwin's  book  was 
so  massive  that  ten  or  twenty  years  either  way  might 
not  have  mattered.  But  in  such  a  case  as  John 
Spargo's  Bolshevism  a  few  months  may  matter.  In 
the  case  of  Mr.  Britling  the  month  as  well  as  the 
year  mattered  vitally.  Time  is  everything,  in  the 
fate  of  many  a  book,  even  as  in  the  fate  of  a  maga- 
zine article,  a  poem,  an  essay,  a  short  story.  Ar- 
thur Guy  Empey  was  on  the  very  hour  with  Over 
the  Top;  but  the  appearance  of  his  Tales  from  a 
Dugout  a  few  days  after  the  signing  of  the  armis- 
tice on  November  11,  1918,  was  one  of  the  minor 
tragedies  of  the  war. 

Therefore  the  publisher  who  can,  as  nearly  as  hu- 
man and  mechanical  conditions  permit,  preserve 
flexibility  in  his  publishing  plans,  has  a  very  great 
advantage  over  inelastic  competitors.  That  iron- 
clad arrangements  a  half  year  ahead  can  be  avoided 
the  methods  of  two  of  the  most  important  Amer- 
ican houses  demonstrate.     Either  can  get  out  a  book 


130  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

on  a  month's  notice.  More  than  once  in  a  season 
this  spells  the  difference  between  a  sale  of  5,000 
and  one  of  15,000  copies — that  is,  between  not  much 
more  than  "breaking  even"  and  making  a  handsome 
profit. 

8 

Every  book  that  is  published  requires  advertising 
though  perhaps  no  two  books  call  for  advertising 
in  just  the  same  way.  One  of  the  best  American 
publishing  houses  figures  certain  sums  for  adver- 
tising— whatever  form  it  may  take — in  its  costs  of 
manufacture  and  then  the  individual  volumes  have 
to  take  each  their  chances  of  getting,  each,  its  proper 
share  of  the  money.  Other  houses  have  similar  un- 
satisfactory devices  for  providing  an  advertising 
fund.  The  result  is  too  often  not  unlike  the  re- 
volving fund  with  which  American  railways  were 
furnished  by  Congress — it  revolved  so  fast  that 
there  wasn't  enough  to  go  round  long. 

A  very  big  publishing  house  does  differently.  To 
the  cost  of  manufacture  of  each  book  is  added  a  spe- 
cific, flat  and  appropriate  sum  of  money  to  adver- 
tise that  particular  book.  The  price  of  the  book  is 
fixed  accordingly.  When  the  book  is  published 
there  is  a  definite  sum  ready  to  advertise  it.  No 
book  goes  unadvertised.  If  the  book  "catches  on" 
there  is  no  trouble,  naturally,  about  more  advertis- 
ing money;  if  it  does  not  sell  the  advertising  of  it 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  131 

stops  when  the  money  set  aside  has  been  exhausted 
and  the  pubHshers  take  their  loss  with  a  clear  con- 
science; they  have  done  their  duty  by  the  book.  It 
may  "be  added  that  this  policy  has  always  paid. 
Combined  with  other  distinctive  methods  it  has  put 
the  house  which  adopted  it  in  the  front  rank. 


Whether  to  publish  a  small,  carefully  selected  list 
of  books  in  a  season  or  a  large  and  comprehensive 
list  is  not  wholly  decided  by  the  capital  at  the  pub- 
lisher's command.  Despite  the  doubling  of  all  costs 
of  book  manufacture,  publishing  is  not  yet  an  en- 
terprise which  requires  a  great  amount  of  capital, 
as  compared  with  other  industries  of  corresponding 
volume.  The  older  a  publishing  house  the  more 
likely  it  is  to  restrict  its  list  of  new  books.  It  has 
more  to  lose  and  less  to  gain  by  taking  a  great  num- 
ber of  risks  in  new  publications.  At  the  same  time 
it  is  subjected  to  severe  competition  because  the  cap- 
ital required  to  become  a  book  publisher  is  not  large. 
Hence  much  caution,  too  much,  no  doubt,  in  many 
cases  and  every  season.  Still,  promising  manu- 
scripts are  lamentably  few.  "Look  at  the  stuff  that 
gets  published,"  is  the  classic  demonstration  of  the 
case. 

The  older  the  house,  the  stronger  its  already  ac- 
cumulated list,  the  more  conservative,  naturally,  it 


132  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

becomes,  the  less  inclined  to  play  with  loaded  dice 
in  the  shape  of  manuscripts.  Yet  a  policy  of  ex- 
treme caution  and  conservatism  is  more  dangerous 
and  deadly  than  a  dash  of  the  gambler's  makeup. 
Two  poor  seasons  together  are  noticed  by  the  trade ; 
four  poor  seasons  together  may  put  a  house  badly 
behind.  A  season  with  ten  books  only,  all  good, 
all  selling  moderately  well,  is  perhaps  more  meri- 
torious and  more  valuable  in  the  long  run  than  a 
season  with  thirty  books,  nearly  all  poor  except  for 
one  or  two  sensational  successes.  But  the  fellow 
who  brings  out  the  thirty  books  and  has  one  or  two 
decided  best  sellers  is  the  fellow  who  will  make  large 
profits,  attract  attention  and  acquire  prestige.  It 
is  far  better  to  try  everything  you  can  that  seems  to 
have  "a  chance"  than  to  miss  something  awfully 
good.  And,  provided  you  drop  the  bad  potatoes 
quickly,  it  will  pay  you  better  in  the  end. 

There  tnust  be  a  big  success  somewhere  on  your 
list.  A  row  of  respectable  and  undistinguished 
books  is  the  most  serious  of  defeats. 


10 

Suppose  you  were  a  book  publisher  and  had  put 
out  a  novel  or  two  by  Author  A.  with  excellent  re- 
sults on  the  profit  side  of  the  ledger.  Author  A. 
is  plainly  a  valuable  property,  like  a  copper  mine  in 
war  time.     A.'s  third  manuscript  comes  along  in  due 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  133 

time.  It  is  entirely  different  from  the  first  two  so- 
successful  novels;  it  is  pretty  certain  to  disappoint 
A.'s  "audience."  You  canvass  the  subject  with 
A.,  who  can't  "see"  your  arguments  and  suggestions. 
It  comes  to  this :  Either  you  publish  the  third  novel 
or  you  lose  A.  Which,  darling  reader,  would  you, 
if  you  were  the  publisher,  do?  Would  you  choose 
the  lady  and  The  Tiger? 

You  are  neatly  started  as  a  book  publisher.  You 
can't  get  advance  sales  for  your  productions  (to  bor- 
row a  term  from  the  theatre).  You  go  to  Memphis 
and  Syracuse  and  interview  booksellers.  They  say 
to  you:  "For  heaven's  sake,  get  authors  whose 
names  mean  something!  Why  should  we  stock  fic- 
tion by  Horatius  Hotaling  when  we  can  dispose  of 
125  copies  of  E.  Phillips  Oppenheim's  latest  in  ten 
days  from  publication?"  Returning  thoughtfully 
to  New  York,  you  happen  to  meet  a  Celebrated  Au- 
thor. Toward  the  close  of  luncheon  at  the  Brevoort 
he  offers  to  let  you  have  a  book  of  short  stories. 
One  of  them  (it  will  be  the  title-story,  of  course) 
was  published  in  the  Saturday  Evening  Post,  bring- 
ing to  Mr.  Lorimer,  the  editor,  2,500  letters  and 
117  telegrams  of  evenly  divided  praise  and  con- 
demnation. Short  stories  are  a  stiff  proposition ;  but 
the  Celebrated  Author  has  a  name  that  will  insure 
a  certain  advance  sale  and  a  fame  that  will  insure 
reviewers'  attention.  For  you  to  become  his  pub- 
lisher will  be  as  prestigious  as  it  is  adventitious. 


134  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

From  ethical  and  other  motives,  you  seek  out  the 
C.  A.'s  present  pubhsher — old,  well-established  house 
— and  inquire  if  Octavo  &  Duodecimo  will  have  any 
objection  to  your  publishing  the  C.  A.'s  book  of 
tales.     Mr,  Octavo  replies  in  friendly  accents: 

"Not  a  bit!  Not  a  bit!  Go  to  it!  However, 
we've  lent  .  .  .  (the  C.  A.)  $2,500  at  one  time  or 
another  in  advance  moneys  on  a  projected  novel. 
Travel  as  far  as  you  like  with  him,  but  remember 
that  he  can't  give  you  a  novel  until  he  has  given  us 
one  or  has  repaid  that  $2,500." 

What  to  do?  'Tis  indeed  a  pretty  problem.  If 
you  pay  Octavo  &  Duodecimo  $2,500  you  can  have 
the  C.  A.'s  next  novel — worth  several  times  as  much 
as  any  book  of  tales,  at  the  least.  On  the  other 
hand,  there  is  no  certainty  that  the  C.  A.  will  de- 
liver you  the  manuscript  of  a  novel.  He  has  been 
going  to  deliver  it  to  Octavo  &  Duodecimo  for  three 
years.  And  you  can't  afiford  to  tie  up  $2,500  on 
the  chance  that  he'll  do  for  you  what  he  hasn't  done 
for  them.   Because  $2,500  is,  to  you,  a  lot  of  money. 

In  the  particular  instance  where  this  happened 
(except  for  details,  we  narrate  an  actual  occur- 
rence) the  beginning  publisher  went  ahead  and  pub- 
lished the  book  of  tales,  and  afterward  another  book 
of  tales,  and  let  Octavo  &  Duodecimo  keep  their 
option  on  the  C.  A.'s  next  novel,  if  he  ever  writes 
any.  The  probabilities  are  that  the  C.  A.  will  write 
short  stories  for  the  rest  of  his  life  rather  than  de- 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  135 

liver  a  novel  from  which  he  will  receive  not  one  cent 
until  $2,500  has  been  deducted  from  the  royalties. 

II 

English  authors  are  keenest  on  advance  money. 
The  English  writer  who  will  undertake  to  do  a  book 
without  some  cash  in  hand  before  putting  pen  to 
paper  is  a  great  rarity.  An  American  publisher  who 
wants  English  manuscripts  and  goes  to  London 
without  his  checkbook  won't  get  anywhere.  A  little 
real  money  will  go  far.  It  will  be  almost  unneces- 
sary for  the  publisher  who  has  it  to  entrain  for  those 
country  houses  where  English  novelists  drink  tea 
and  train  roses.  Kent,  Sussex,  Norfolk,  York- 
shire, Wessex,  &c.,  will  go  down  to  London.  Mr. 
Britling  will  motor  into  town  to  talk  about  a  con- 
tract. All  the  London  clubs  will  be  named  as  ren- 
dezvous. Visiting  cards  will  reach  the  publisher's 
hotel,  signifying  the  advent  of  Mr.  Percival  Foth- 
eringay  of  Houndsditch,  Bayswater,  Wapping  Old 
Stairs,  London,  B.  C.  Ah,  yes,  Fotheringay ;  won- 
derful stories  of  Whitechapel  and  the  East  End, 
really !    Knows  the  people — what  ? 

It  has  to  be  said  that  advances  on  books  seem  to 
retard  their  delivery.  We  have  in  mind  a  famous 
English  author  (though  he  might  as  well  be  Amer- 
ican, so  far  as  this  particular  point  is  concerned) 
who  got  an  advance  of  $500  (wasn't  it?)  some  years 


136  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ago  from  Quarto  &  Folio — on  a  book  of  essays. 
Quarto  &  Folio  have  carried  that  title  in  their  spring 
and  fall  catalogues  of  forthcoming  books  ever  since. 
Spring  and  fall  they  despair  afresh.  Daylight  sav- 
ing did  nothing  to  help  them — an  hour  gained  was 
a  mere  bagatelle  in  the  cycles  of  time  through  which 
Fads  and  Fatalities  keeps  moving  in  a  regular  and 
always  equidistant  orbit.  If  some  day  the  League 
of  Nations  shall  ordain  that  the  calendar  be  set 
ahead  six  months  Quarto  &  Folio  may  get  the  com- 
pleted manuscript  of  Fads  and  Fatalities. 

American  authors  are  much  less  insistent  on  ad- 
vance payments  than  their  cousins  3,000  miles  re- 
moved. A  foremost  American  publishing  house  has 
two  inflexible  rules :  No  advance  payments  and  no 
verdict  on  uncompleted  manuscripts.  Inflexible — 
but  it  is  to  be  suspected  that  though  this  house  never 
bends  the  rule  there  are  times  when  it  has  to  break 
it.  What  won't  bend  must  break.  There  are  a  few 
authors  for  whom  any  publisher  will  do  anything 
except  go  to  jail.  Probably  you  would  make  the 
same  extensive  efforts  to  retain  your  exclusive 
rights  in  a  South  African  diamond  digging  which 
had  already  produced  a  bunch  of  Kohinoors. 

There  is  a  gentleman's  agreement  among  pub- 
lishers, arrived  at  some  years  back,  not  to  indulge 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  137 

in  cutthroat  competition  for  each  other's  authors. 
This  ethical  principle,  like  most  ethical  principles 
now  existing,  is  dictated  quite  as  much  by  considera- 
tions of  keeping  a  whole  skin  as  by  a  sense  of  pro- 
fessional honor.  There  are  some  men  in  the  book 
publishing  business  whose  honorable  standards  have 
a  respect  for  the  other  fellow's  property  first  among 
their  Fourteen  Points.  There  are  others  who  are 
best  controlled  by  a  knowledge  that  to  do  so-and-so 
would  be  very  unhealthy  for  themselves. 

The  agreement,  like  most  unwritten  laws,  is  in- 
terpreted with  various  shadings.  Some  of  these  are 
subtle  and  some  of  them  are  not.  It  is  variously 
applied  by  different  men  in  different  cases,  some- 
times unquestionably  and  sometimes  doubtfully. 
But  in  the  main  it  is  pretty  extensively  and  strictly 
upheld,  in  spirit  as  in  letter. 

How  far  it  transgresses  authors'  privileges  or 
limits  authors'  opportunities  would  be  difficult  to 
say.  In  the  nature  of  the  case,  any  such  under- 
standing must  operate  to  some  extent  to  lessen  the 
chances  of  an  author  receiving  the  highest  possible 
compensation  for  his  work.  Whether  this  is  offset 
by  the  favors  and  concessions,  pecuniary  and  other- 
wise, made  to  an  author  by  a  publisher  to  whom  he 
adheres,  can't  be  settled.  The  relation  of  author 
and  publisher,  at  best,  calls  for,  and  generally  elicits, 
striking  displays  of  loyalty  on  both  sides.     Particu- 


138  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

larly  among-  Americans,  the  most  ideaHstic  people 
on  earth. 

In  its  practical  working  this  publishers'  under- 
standing operates  to  prevent  any  publisher  "ap- 
proaching" an  author  who  has  an  accepted  publisher 
of  his  books.  Unless  you,  as  a  publisher,  are  your- 
self approached  by  Author  B.,  whose  several  books 
have  been  brought  out  by  Publisher  C,  you  are 
theoretically  bound  hand  and  foot.  And  even  if 
Author  B.  comes  to  you  there  are  circumstances  un- 
der which  you  may  well  find  it  desirable  to  talk 
B.'s  proposal  over  with  C,  hitherto  his  publisher. 
After  that  talk  you  may  wish  B.  were  in  Halifax. 
If  everybody  told  the  truth  matters  would  be  greatly 
simplified.     Or  would  they? 

If  you  hear  that  Author  D.,  who  writes  very  good 
sellers,  is  dissatisfied  with  Publisher  F.,  what  is  your 
duty  in  the  circumstances?  Author  D.  may  not 
come  to  you,  for  there  are  many  publishers  for  such 
as  he  to  choose  from.  Shall  we  say  it  is  your  duty 
to  acquaint  D.,  indirectly  perhaps,  with  the  manifest 
advantages  of  bringing  you  his  next  novel?  We'll 
say  so. 

Whatever  publishers  agree  to,  authors  are  free. 
And  every  publisher  knows  how  easy  it  is  to  lose 
an  author.  Why,  they  leave  you  like  that !  (Busi- 
ness of  snapping  fingers. )  xA.nd  for  the  lightest  rea- 
sons! (Register  pain  or  maybe  moumfulness.)  If 
D.  W.  Griffith  wanted  to  make  a  Movie  of  a  Pub- 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  139 

hsher  Losing  an  Author  he  would  find  the  action 
too  swift  for  the  camera  to  record.  Might  as  well 
try  to  film  The  Birth  of  a  Notion. 


13 

One  of  the  most  fascinating  mysteries  about  pub- 
lishers, at  least  to  authors,  is  the  method  or  meth- 
ods by  which  they  determine  the  availability  of 
manuscripts.  Fine  word,  availability.  Noncom- 
mittal and  all  that.  It  has  no  taint  of  infallibility 
— which  is  the  last  attribute  a  publisher  makes  pre- 
tensions to. 

There  are  places  where  one  man  decides  whether 
a  manuscript  will  do  and  there  are  places  where  it 
takes  practically  the  whole  clerical  force  and  several 
plebiscites  to  accept  or  reject  the  author's  offering. 
One  house  which  stands  in  the  front  rank  in  this 
country  accepts  and  rejects  mainly  on  the  verdicts 
of  outsiders — specialists,  however,  in  various  fields. 
Another  foremost  publishing  house  has  a  special 
test  for  "popular"  novels  in  manuscript.  An  extra 
ration  of  chewing  gum  is  served  out  to  all  the  ste- 
nographers and  they  are  turned  loose  on  the  type- 
written pages.  If  they  react  well  the  firm  signs  a 
contract  and  prints  a  first  edition  of  from  5,000  to 
25,000  copies,  depending  on  whether  it  is  a  first 
novel  or  not  and  the  precise  comments  of  the  girls 
at  page  378. 


140  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Always  the  sales  manager  reads  the  manuscript, 
if  it  is  at  all  seriously  considered.  What  he  says 
has  much  weight.  He's  the  boy  who  will  have  to 
sell  the  book  to  the  trade  and  unless  he  can  see  things 
in  it,  or  can  be  got  to,  there  is  practically  no  hope 
despite  Dr.  Munyon's  index  finger. 

Recently  a  publishing  house  of  national  reputa- 
tion has  done  a  useful  thing — we  are  not  prepared 
to  say  it  is  wholly  new — by  establishing  a  liaison 
officer.  This  person  does  not  pass  on  manuscripts, 
unless  incidentally  by  way  of  offering  his  verdict 
to  be  considered  with  the  verdicts  of  other  depart- 
ment heads.  But  once  a  manuscript  has  been  ac- 
cepted by  the  house  it  goes  straight  to  this  man  who 
reads  it  intensively  and  sets  down,  on  separate 
sheets,  everything  about  it  that  might  be  useful  to 
(a)  the  advertising  manager,  (b)  the  sales  manager 
and  his  force,  and  (c)  the  editorial  people  handling 
the  firm's  book  publicity  effort. 

A  little  knowledge  of  book  publishing  teaches  im- 
mense humility.  The  number  of  known  instances 
in  which  experienced  publishers  have  erred  in  judg- 
ment is  large.  Authors  always  like  to  hear  of  these. 
But  too  much  must  not  be  deduced  from  them. 
Every  one  has  heard  of  the  rejection  of  Henry  Syd- 
nor  Harrison's  novel  Queed.     Many  have  heard  of 


What  Every  Publisher  Knows  141 

the  publisher  who  decided  not  to  "do"  Vicente 
Blasco  Ibafiez's  The  Four  Horsemen  of  the  Apoc- 
alypse. There  was  more  than  one  of  him,  by  the 
way,  and  in  each  case  he  had  an  exceedingly  bad 
translation  to  take  or  reject  (we  are  told),  the  only 
worthy  translation,  apparently,  being  that  which  was 
brought  out  with  such  sensational  success  in  the 
early  fall  of  191 8.  A  publisher  lost  Spoon  River 
Anthology  because  of  a  delay  in  acceptance — he 
wanted  the  opinion  of  a  confrere  not  easily  reached. 
For  every  publisher's  mistake  of  this  sort  there  could 
probably  be  cited  an  instance  of  perspicacity  much 
more  striking.  Such  was  the  acceptance  of  Edward 
Lucas  White's  El  Supremo  after  many  rejections. 
And  how  about  the  publisher  who  accepted  Queed? 

15 

Let  us  conclude  these  haphazard  and  very  likely 
unhelpful  musings  on  an  endless  subject  by  telling  a 
true  story. 

In  the  spring  of  19 19  one  of  the  principal  pubHsh- 
ing  houses  in  America  and  England  undertook  the 
publication  of  a  very  unusual  sort  of  a  novel,  semi- 
autobiographical,  a  work  of  love  and  leisure  by  a 
man  who  had  gained  distinction  as  an  executive.  It 
was  a  fine  piece  of  work,  though  strange;  had  a  de- 
lightful reminiscential  quality.  The  book  was  made 
up,  a  first  edition  of  moderate  size  printed  and 


142  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

bound.  It  was  not  till  this  had  been  done  and  the 
book  was  ready  to  place  on  sale  that  the  head  of  this 
publishing  house  had  an  opportunity  to  read  it. 

The  Head  is  a  veteran  publisher  famous  for  his 
prescience  in  the  matter  of  manuscripts  and  for  hon- 
orable dealings. 

He  read  the  book  through  and  was  charmed  by 
it;  he  looked  at  the  book  and  was  unhappy.  He 
sent  for  everybody  who  had  had  to  do  with  the  mak- 
ing of  this  book.  He  held  up  his  copy  and  flut- 
tered pages  and  said,  in  effect : 

"This  has  been  done  all  wrong.  Here  is  a  book 
of  quite  exceptional  quality.  I  don't  think  it  will 
sell.  Only  moderately,  though  perhaps  rather  stead- 
ily for  some  years  to  come.  It  won't  make  us 
money.  To  speak  of.  But  it  deserves,  intrin- 
sically, better  treatment.  Better  binding.  This  is 
only  ordinary  six-months'-selling  novel  binding.  It 
deserves  larger  type.  Type  with  a  more  beautiful 
face.  Fewer  lines  to  the  page.  Lovelier  dress 
from  cover  to  cover. 

"Throw  away  the  edition  that  has  been  printed. 
Destroy  it  or  something.  At  least,  hide  it.  Don't 
let  any  of  it  get  out.  For  this  has  been  done  wrong, 
all  wrong.     Do  it  over." 

So  they  went  away  from  his  presence  and  did  it 
right.  It  meant  throwing  away  about  $2,000.  Or 
was  it  a  $2,000  investment  in  the  good  opinion  of 
people  who  buy,  read  and  love  books  ? 


THE    SECRET   OF   THE 
SELLER 


BEST 


VII 

THE  SECRET  OF  THE  BEST  SELLER 

BY  "best  seller"  we  may  mean  one  of  several 
things.  Dr.  Emmett  Holt's  Care  and  Feed- 
ing of  Children,  of  which  the  fifty-eighth  edition 
was  printed  in  the  spring  of  1919,  is  one  kind  of 
best  seller;  Owen  Wister's  The  Virginian  is  quite 
another.  The  number  of  editions  of  a  book  is  a 
very  uncertain  indication  of  sales  to  a  person  not 
familiar  with  book  publishing.  Editions  may  con- 
sist of  as  few  as  500  copies  or  as  many  as  25,000 
or  even  50,000.  The  advance  sale  of  Gene  Strat- 
ton-Porter's  A  Daughter  of  the  Land  was,  if  we  re- 
call the  figure  exactly,  150,000  copies.  These, 
therefore,  were  printed  and  distributed  by  the  day 
when  the  book  was  placed  on  sale,  or  shortly  there- 
after. To  call  this  the  "first  edition"  would  be 
rather  meaningless. 

One  thousand  copies  of  a  book  of  poems — unless 
it  be  an  anthology — is  a  large  edition  indeed.  But 
not  for  Edgar  Guest,  whose  books  sell  in  the  tens 
of  thousands.  The  sale,  within  a  couple  of  years, 
of  31,000  copies  of  the  poems  of  Alan  Seeger  was 
phenomenal. 

145 


146  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

The  first  book  of  essays  of  an  American  writer 
sold  6,000  copies  within  six  months  of  its  publi- 
cation. This  upset  most  precedents  of  the  book- 
selling trade.  The  author's  royalties  may  have 
been  $1,125.  ^  ^^w  hundred  dollars  should  be 
added  to  represent  money  received  for  the  casual 
publication  of  the  essays  in  magazines  before  their 
appearance  in  the  book.  Of  course  the  volume  did 
not  stop  selling  at  the  end  of  six  months. 

Compare  these  figures,  however,  with  the  income 
of  one  of  the  most  popular  American  novelists.  A 
single  check  for  $75,000.  Total  payments,  over  a 
period  of  fifteen  years,  of  $750,000  to  $1,000,000. 
Yet  it  is  doubtful  if  the  books  of  this  novelist 
reached  more  than  65  per  cent,  of  their  possible 
audience. 

It  is  a  moderate  estimate,  in  our  opinion,  that 
most  books  intended  for  the  "general  reader," 
whether  fiction  or  not,  do  not  reach  more  than  one- 
quarter  of  the  whole  body  of  readers  each  might 
attain.  With  the  proper  machinery  of  publicity 
and  merchandising  book  sales  in  the  United  States 
could  be  quadrupled.  We  share  this  opinion  with 
Harry  Blackman  Sell  of  the  Chicago  Daily  News 
and  were  interested  to  find  it  independently  con- 
firmed by  James  H.  Collins  who,  writing  in  the  Sat- 
urday Evening  Post  of  May  3,  19 19,  under  the  head- 
ing When  Merchandise  Sells  Itself,  said  : 

"Book  publishing  is  one  industry  that  suffers  for 


The  Best  Seller  147 


lack  of  retail  outlets.  Even  the  popular  novel  sells 
in  numbers  far  below  the  real  buying  power  of  this 
nation  of  readers,  because  perhaps  25  per  cent,  of 
the  public  can  examine  it  and  buy  it  at  the  city  book 
stores,  while  it  is  never  seen  by  the  rest  of  the  public. 

"For  lack  of  quantity  production  based  on  wide 
retail  distribution  the  novel  sells  for  a  dollar  and 
a  half. 

"But  for  a  dollar  you  can  buy  a  satisfactory 
watch. 

"That  is  made  possible  by  quantity  production. 
Quantity  production  of  dollar  watches  is  based  on 
their  sale  in  50,000  miscellaneous  shops,  through 
the  standard  stock  and  the  teaching  of  modern  mer- 
cantile methods.  Book  publishers  have  made  ex- 
periments with  the  dollar  novel,  but  it  sold  just 
about  the  same  number  of  copies  as  the  $1.50  novel, 
because  only  about  so  many  fiction  buyers  were 
reached  through  the  bookstores.  Now  the  stand- 
ard-stock idea  is  being  applied  to  books,  with  assort- 
ments of  50  or  100  proved  titles  carried  by  the  drug- 
gist and  stationer." 


Speaking  rather  offhandedly,  we  are  of  opinion 
that  not  more  than  two  living  American  writers  of 
fiction  have  achieved  anything  like  a  100  per  cent. 


148  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

sale  of  their  books.  These  are  Harold  Bell  Wright 
and  Gene  Stratton-Porter. 

I  am  indebted  to  Mr.  Frank  K.  Reilly,  president 
of  the  Reilly  &  Lee  Company,  Chicago,  selling 
agents  for  the  original  editions  of  all  Mr.  Wright's 
books,  for  the  following  figures  : 

"We  began,"  wrote  Mr.  Reilly,  "with  That 
Printer  of  Udell's — selling,  as  I  remember  the  fig- 
ures, about  20,000.  Then  The  Shepherd  of  the 
Hills — about  100,000,  I  think.  Then  the  others  in 
fast  growing  quantities.  For  The  Winning  of 
Barbara  Worth  we  took  four  orders  in  advance 
which  totalled  nearly  200,000  copies.  On  When  a 
Man's  a  Man  we  took  the  biggest  single  order  ever 
placed  for  a  novel  at  full  price — that  is,  a  cloth- 
bound,  'regular'  $1.35  book — 250,000  copies  from 
the  Western  News  Company.  The  advance  sale  of 
this  1916  book  was  over  465,000." 

Mr.  Reilly  wrote  at  the  beginning  of  March, 
1919,  from  French  Lick,  Indiana,  At  that  time 
]\Ir.  Wright's  publishers  had  in  hand  a  novel.  The 
Re-Creation  of  Brian  Kent,  published  August  21, 
19 1 9.  They  had  arranged  for  a  first  printing  of 
750,000  copies  and  were  as  certain  of  selling  500,- 
000  copies  before  August  i  as  you  are  of  going  to 
sleep  some  time  in  the  next  twenty-four  hours.  It 
was  necessary  to  make  preparations  for  the  sale  of 
1,000,000  copies  of  the  new  novel  before  August 
21,  1920. 


The  Best  Seller  149 


The  sale  of  1,000,000  copies  of  The  Re-Creation 
of  Brian  Kent  within  a  year  of  publication  may  be 
said  to  achieve  a  100  per  cent,  circulation  so  far  as 
existing  book  merchandising  facilities  allow. 

The  sale,  within  ten  years,  of  670,733  copies  of 
Gene  Stratton-Porter's  story,  Freckles,  approaches 
a  100  per  cent,  sale  but  with  far  too  much  retarda- 
tion. 


How  has  the  100  per  cent,  sale  for  the  Harold 
Bell  Wright  books  been  brought  within  hailing  dis- 
tance ? 

Before  us  lies  a  circular  which  must  have  been 
mailed  to  most  booksellers  in  the  United  States 
early  in  the  spring  of  1919.  It  is  headed:  "First 
Publicity  Advertisement  of  Our  $100,000  Cam- 
paign." Below  this  legend  is  an  advertisement  of 
The  Re-Creation  of  Brian  Kent.  Below  that  is  a 
statement  that  the  advertisement  will  appear,  simul- 
taneously with  the  book's  publication,  in  "magazines 
and  national  and  religious  weeklies  having  millions 
upon  millions  of  circulation.  In  addition  to  this 
our  newspaper  advertising  will  cover  all  of  the  larger 
cities  of  the  United  States."  Then  follows  a  list 
of  "magazines,  national  and  religious  weeklies  cov- 
ered by  our  signed  advertising  contracts." 

There  are  132  of  them.  The  range  is  from  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  and  the  New  Republic  to  Vanity 


150  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Fair  and  Town  Topics  in  one  slant;  from  System 
and  Physical  Culture  to  Zion's  Herald  and  the 
Catholic  News;  from  Life  to  Needlecraft;  from  the 
Photoplay  World  to  the  Girl's  Companion;  from  the 
Outlook  to  the  Lookout — and  to  and  fro  and  back 
and  forth  in  a  web  covering  all  America  between 
the  two  Portlands. 

There  are  about  140,000,000  persons  in  the 
United  States  and  Great  Britain  together.  Over 
100,000,000  of  them,  we  are  told,  have  read  a  Har- 
old Bell  Wright  book  or  seen  a  Harold  Bell  Wright 
movie. 

The  secret  of  the  sale  of  Mr.  Wright's  books,  so 
far  as  the  external  factor  is  concerned,  resides  in 
the  fact  that  his  stories  have  been  brought  to  the 
attention  of  thousands  upon  thousands  who,  from 
one  year's  end  to  the  other,  never  have  a  new  book 
of  fiction  thrust  upon  their  attention  by  advertising 
or  by  sight  of  the  book  itself. 


We  speak  of  the  "external  factor."  There  is  an 
external  factor  quite  as  much  as  an  internal  factor 
in  the  success  of  every  best  seller  of  whatever  sort. 
The  tendency  of  everybody  who  gives  any  atten- 
tion to  the  subject,  but  particularly  the  book  pub- 
lisher, is  to  study  the  internal  factor  almost  to  the 
exclusion  of  the  other.     What,  you  naturally  ask 


The  Best  Seller  151 


yourself,  are  the  qualities  in  this  book  that  have 
made  it  sell  so  remarkably? 

The  internal  factor  is  important.  Its  impor- 
tance, doubtless,  cannot  be  overrated.  But  it  is  not 
the  whole  affair.  Before  we  go  further  let  us  lay 
down  some  general  principles  that  are  not  often 
formulated  clearly  enough  even  in  the  minds  of 
those  to  whom  they  import  most. 

1.  The  internal  factor — certain  qualities  of  the 
book  itself — predetermines  its  possible  audience. 

2.  The  external  factor — the  extent  to  which  it  is 
brought  to  public  attention,  the  manner  in  which 
it  is  presented  to  the  public,  the  ubiquity  of  copies 
for  sale — determines  its  actual  audience. 

3.  The  internal  factor  can  make  a  best  seller  of 
a  book  with  almost  no  help  from  the  external  fac- 
tor, but  cannot  give  it  a  100  per  cent.  sale. 

4.  The  external  factor  cannot  make  a  big  seller 
where  the  internal  factor  is  not  of  the  right  sort; 
but  it  can  always  give  a  100  per  cent.  sale. 

5.  The  internal  factor  is  only  partly  in  the  pub- 
lisher's control;  the  external  factor  is  entirely  con- 
trollable by  the  publisher. 

There  are  two  secrets  of  the  best  seller.  One 
resides  in  the  book  itself,  the  other  rests  in  the  man- 
ner of  its  exploitation.  One  is  inherent,  the  other 
is  circumstantial.  One  is  partly  controllable  by 
the  publisher,  the  other  is  wholly  so.  Since  a  book 
possessing  certain  qualities  in  a  sufficient  degree  will 


152  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

sell  heavily  anyway,  it  is  human  nature  to  hunt 
ceaselessly  for  this  thing  .which  will  triumph  over 
every  sort  of  handicap  and  obstacle.  But  it  is  a 
lazy  way  to  do.  It  is  not  good  business.  It  can- 
not, ultimately,  pay.  The  successful  book  pub- 
lisher of  the  future  is  going  to  be  the  publisher  who 
works  for  a  100  per  cent,  sale  on  all  his  books. 
When  he  gets  a  book  with  an  internal  factor  which 
would  make  it  a  best  seller  anyway,  it  will  simply 
mean  that  he  will  have  to  exert  himself  markedly 
less  to  get  a  100  per  cent,  result.  He  will  have 
such  best  sellers  and  will  make  large  sums  of  money 
with  them,  but  they  will  be  incidents  and  not 
epochal  events;  for  practically  all  his  books  will  be 
good  sellers. 


Before  we  go  on  to  a  discussion  of  the  internal 
factor  of  the  best  seller  we  want  to  stress  once  more, 
and  constructively  and  suggestively,  the  postnatal 
attention  it  should  receive.  The  first  year  and  the 
second  summer  are  fatal  to  far  too  many  books  as 
well  as  humans.  And  this  is  true  despite  the  dif- 
ferences between  the  two.  If  100,000  copies  rep- 
resent the  100  per  cent,  sale  of  a  given  volume  you 
may  declare  that  it  makes  no  difference  whether 
that  sale  is  attained  in  six  months  or  six  years. 
From  the  business  standpoint  of  a  quick  turnover 
six  months  is  a  dozen  times  better,  you  may  argue; 


The  Best  Seller  153 


and  if  interest  on  invested  money  be  thought  of  as 
compounding,  the  apparent  difference  in  favor  of 
the  six-months'  sale  is  still  more  striking.  This 
would  perhaps  be  true  if  the  author's  next  book 
could  invariably  be  ready  at  the  end  of  the  six- 
months'  period.  Other  ifs  will  occur  to  those  with 
some  knowledge  of  the  publishing  business  and  a 
moderate  capacity  for  reflection. 

Most  books  are  wrongly  advertised  and  inade- 
quately advertised,  and  rather  frequently  advertised 
in  the  wrong  places. 

Of  the  current  methods  of  advertising  new  fic- 
tion only  one  is  unexceptionably  good.  This  is  the 
advertising  which  arrests  the  reader's  attention  and 
baits  his  interest  by  a  few  vivid  sentences  outlining 
the  crisis  of  the  storj^  the  dilemma  that  confronts 
the  hero  or  heroine,  the  problem  of  whether  the 
hero  or  heroine  acted  rightly;  or  paints  in  a  few 
swift  strokes  some  exciting  episode  of  the  action — 
ending  with  a  question  that  will  stick  in  the  reader's 
mind.  Such  an  advertisement  should  always  have 
a  drawing  or  other  illustration  if  possible.  It 
should  be  displayed  in  a  generous  space  and  should 
be  placed  broadcast  but  with  much  discrimination  as 
to  where  it  is  to  appear. 

A  kind  of  advertisement  somewhat  allied  to  this, 
but  not  in  use  at  all  despite  its  assured  selling  power 
would  consist  of  the  simple  reproduction  of  a  photo- 
graphed page  of  the  book.     The  Detroit  News  has 


154  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

used  such  reproduced  pages  so  effectively  as  illus- 
trations that  it  seems  strange  no  publisher  (so  far 
as  we  know)  has  followed  suit.  Striking  pages, 
and  pages  containing  not  merely  objective  thrill  but 
the  flavor  which  makes  the  fascination  of  a  par- 
ticular book,  can  be  found  in  most  novels.  The 
Detroit  News  selected  a  page  of  the  highest  effec- 
tiveness from  so  subtle  a  romance  as  Joseph  Con- 
rad's The  Arrow  of  Gold.  This  manner  of  adver- 
tising, telling  from  its  complete  restraint,  is  af>- 
plicable  to  non-fiction.  A  page  of  a  book  of  essays 
by  Samuel  Crothers  would  have  to  be  poorly  taken 
not  to  disclose,  in  its  several  hundred  words,  the 
charm  and  fun  of  his  observations.  Publishers  of 
encyclopaedias  have  long  employed  this  "page-from- 
the-book"  method  of  advertisement  with  the  best 
results. 

The  ordinary  advertisement  of  a  book,  making 
a  few  flat  assertions  of  the  book's  extraordinary 
merit,  has  become  pretty  hopelessly  conventional- 
ized. The  punch  is  gone  from  it,  we  rather  fear 
forever.  In  all  conscience,  it  is  psychologically  de- 
fective in  that  it  tries  to  coerce  attention  and  cre- 
dence instead  of  trying  to  attract,  fascinate  or 
arouse  the  beholder.  The  advertiser  is  not  differ- 
ent, essentially,  from  the  public  speaker.  The  pub- 
lic speaker  who  aims  to  compel  attention  by  mere 
thundering  or  by  extraordinary  assertions  has  no 
chance  against  the  speaker  who  amuses,  interests, 


The  Best  Seller  155 


or  agreeably  piques  his  audience,  who  stirs  his  au- 
ditors' curiosity  or  kindles  their  collective  imagina- 
tion. 

There  is  too  little  personality  in  the  advertising 
of  books,  and  when  we  say  personality  we  mean, 
in  most  cases,  the  author's  personality.  The  bald 
and  unconvincing  recital  of  the  opinion  of  the 
Westminster  Gazette,  that  this  is  a  book  every  An- 
glo-American should  read,  is  as  nothing  compared 
with  a  few  dozen  words  that  could  have  been  writ- 
ten of,  or  by,  no  man  on  earth  except  H.  G.  Wells. 

The  internal  factor  of  H.  G.  Wells's  novel  The 
Undying  Fire  is  so  big  that  it  constitutes  a  sort  of 
a  least  common  multiple  of  the  hopes,  doubts  and 
fears  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  humans.  A  100 
per  cent,  sale  of  the  book,  under  existing  merchan- 
dising conditions,  would  be  400,000  copies,  at  the 
very  least.  It  ought  to  be  advertised  in  every  na- 
tional and  religious  weekly  of  10,000  circulation 
or  over  in  the  United  States,  and  in  every  periodical 
of  that  circulation  reaching  a  rural  audience.  And 
it  ought  to  be  advertised,  essentially,  in  this  manner : 

Shall  Man  Curse  God  and  Die? 

No!  J  oh  Answered 

No!    H.  G.  Wells  Tells  Stricken  Europe 

Read  His  Nezv  Short  Novel,  "The  Undying  Fire," 

in  Which  He  Holds  Out  the  Hope  that  Men 


156  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

May  Yet  Unite  to  Organize  the  World  and 
Save  Mankind  from  Extinction 

Such  an  appeal  to  the  hope,  the  aspiration,  the 
unconquerable  idealism  of  men  everywhere,  to  the 
social  instinct  which  has  its  roots  in  thousands  of 
years  of  human  history,  cannot  fail. 


Books  are  wrongly  advertised,  as  we  have  said, 
and  they  are  inadequately  advertised,  by  which  we 
mean  in  too  few  places;  and  perhaps  "insufficiently 
advertised"  had  been  a  more  accurate  phrase. 

It  is  correct  and  essential  to  advertise  books  in 
periodicals  appealing  wholly  or  partly  to  book  read- 
ers.    It  is  just  as  essential  to  recruit  readers. 

Book  readers  can  be  recruited  just  as  magazine 
readers  are  recruited.  The  most  important  way 
of  getting  magazine  readers  is  still  the  subscription 
agent.  Every  community  of  any  size  in  these 
United  States  should  have  in  it  a  man  or  woman 
of  at  least  high  school  education  and  alert  enthusi- 
asm selling  books  of  all  the  publishers.  Where 
there  is  a  good  bookstore  such  an  agent  is  unneces- 
sary or  may  be  found  in  the  owner  of  the  store  or 
an  employee  thereof.  Most  communities  cannot 
support  a  store  given  over  entirely  to  bookselling. 
In  them  let  there  be  agents  giving  their  whole  time 


The  Best  Seller  157 


or  their  spare  time  and  operating  with  practically 
no  overhead  expense.  Where  the  agents  receive 
salaries  these  must  be  paid  jointly  by  all  the  pub- 
lishers whose  books  they  handle.  This  should  nat- 
urally be  done  through  a  central  bureau  or  selling 
agency.     Efficient  agencies  already  exist. 

The  "book  agent"  is  a  classical  joke.  He  is  a 
classical  joke  because  he  peddled  one  book,  and  the 
wrong  sort  of  a  book,  from  door  to  door.  You 
must  equip  him  with  fifty  books,  new  and  alluring, 
of  all  publishers;  and  arm  him  with  sheets  and  cir- 
culars describing  enticingly  a  hundred  others.  He 
must  know  individuals  and  their  tastes  and  must 
have  one  or  more  of  the  best  book  reviewing  period- 
icals in  the  country.  He  must  have  catalogues  and 
news  notes  and  special  offers  to  put  over.  If  he 
gives  you  all  his  time  he  must  have  assurance  of  a 
living,  especially  until  he  has  a  good  start  or  ex- 
hibits his  incapacity  for  pioneering.  He  must  have 
an  incentive  above  and  beyond  any  salary  that  may 
be  paid  him. 

But  the  consideration  of  details  in  this  place  is  im- 
possible. The  structural  outline  and  much  adapt- 
able detail  is  already  in  highly  successful  use  by 
periodicals  of  many  sorts.  In  fundamentals  it  re- 
quires no  profounder  skill  than  that  of  the  clever 
copyist. 


158  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


We  charged  in  the  third  count  of  our  indictment 
that  bool<s  are  rather  frequently  advertised  in  the 
wrong  places.  We  had  in  mind  the  principle  that 
for  every  book  considerable  enough  to  get  itself 
published  by  a  publisher  of  standing  there  is,  some- 
where, a  particular  audience;  just  as  there  is  a  cer- 
tain body  of  readers  for  every  news  item  of  enough 
moment  to  get  printed  in  a  daily  newspaper.  A 
juster  way  of  expressing  the  trouble  would  be  this: 
Books  are  rather  frequently  not  advertised  in  the 
right  places. 

The  clues  to  the  right  places  must  be  sought  in 
the  book  itself  and  its  authorship,  always;  and  they 
are  innumerable.  As  no  two  books  are  alike  the 
best  thing  to  do  will  be  to  take  a  specific  example. 
Harry  Lauder's  A  Minstrel  in  France  will  serve. 

The  first  and  most  obvious  thing  to  do  is  to  ad- 
vertise it  in  every  vaudeville  theatre  in  America. 
Wherever  the  programme  includes  motion  pictures 
flash  the  advertisement  on  the  screen  with  a  fifteen 
second  movie  of  Lauder  himself.  Posters  and  cir- 
culars in  the  lobby  must  ser\'e  if  there  are  no  screen 
pictures. 

The  next  and  almost  equally  obvious  thing  is  to 
have  Lauder  make  a  phonograph  record  of  some 
particularly  effective  passage  in  the  book,  market- 
ing the  record  in  the  usual  w-ay,  at  a  popular  price. 


The  Best  Seller  159 


Newspaper  and  magazine  advertising  must  be  used 
heavily  and  must  be  distributed  on  the  basis  of  cir- 
culation almost  entirely. 

8 

The  external  factor  in  the  success  of  the  best 
seller  is  so  undeveloped  and  so  rich  in  possibilities 
that  one  takes  leave  of  it  with  regret ;  but  we  must 
go  on  to  some  consideration  of  the  internal  factor 
that  makes  for  big  sales — the  quality  or  qualities  in 
the  book  itself. 

Without  going  into  a  long  and  elaborate  inves- 
tigation of  best-seller  books,  sifting  and  reasoning 
until  we  reach  rock  bottom,  we  had  better  put  down 
a  few  dogmas.  These,  then,  are  the  essentials  of 
best-selling  fiction  so  far  as  our  observation  and 
intellect  has  carried  us : 

I.  A  good  story;  which  means,  as  a  rule,  plenty 
of  surface  action  but  always  means  a  crisis  in  the 
affairs  of  one  or  two  most-likable  characters,  a  crisis 
that  is  satisfactorily  solved. 

Mark  the  italicized  word.  Not  a  "happy  end- 
ing" in  the  twisted  sense  in  which  that  phrase  is 
used.  Always  a  happy  ending  in  the  sense  in  which 
we  say,  "That  was  a  happy  word" — meaning  a  fit 
word,  the  "mot  just"  of  the  French.  Always  a 
fitting  ending,  not  always  a  "happy  ending"  in  the 
sense  of  a  pleasant  ending.     The  ending  of  Mr. 


i6o  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Britling  Sees  It  Through  is  not  pleasant,  but  fitting 
and,  to  the  majority  of  readers,  uplifting,  ennobling, 
fine. 

2.  Depths  below  the  surface  action  for  those  who 
care  to  plumb  them. 

No  piece  of  fiction  can  sell  largely  unless  it  has 
a  region  of  philosophy,  moral  ideas — whatever  you 
will  to  call  it — for  those  who  crave  and  must  have 
that  mental  immersion.  The  reader  must  not  be 
led  beyond  his  depth  but  he  must  be  able  to  go  into 
deep  water  and  swim  as  far  as  his  strength  will 
carry  him  if  he  so  desires. 

3.  The  ethical,  social  and  moral  implications  of 
the  surface  action  must,  in  the  end,  accord  with  the 
instinctive  desires  of  mankind.  This  is  nothing  like 
as  fearful  as  it  sounds,  thus  abstractly  stated. 
The  instinctive  desires  of  men  are  pretty  well 
known.  Any  psychologist  can  tell  you  what  they 
are.  They  are  few,  primitive  and  simple.  They 
have  nothing  to  do  with  man's  reason  except  that 
man,  from  birth  to  death,  employs  his  reason  in 
achieving  the  satisfaction  of  these  instincts.  The 
two  oldest  and  most  firmly  implanted  are  the  in- 
stinct for  self-preservation  and  the  instinct  to  per- 
petuate the  race.  The  social  instinct,  much  younger 
than  either,  is  yet  thousands  upon  thousands  of  years 
old  and  quite  as  ineradicable. 

Because  it  violates  the  self-preservative  instinct 
no  story  of  suicide  can  have  a  wide  human  audience 


The  Best  Seller  i6i 


unless,  in  the  words  of  Dick  at  the  close  of  Mase- 
field's  Lost  Endeavour,  we  are  filled  with  the  feel- 
ing that  "life  goes  on."  The  act  of  destruction 
must  be,  however  blindly,  an  act  of  immolation  on 
the  altar  of  the  race.  Such  is  the  feeling  we  get 
in  reading  Jack  London's  largely  autobiographical 
Martin  Eden;  and  in  a  much  more  striking  instance, 
the  terrible  act  that  closed  the  life  of  the  heroine 
in  Tolstoy's  Anna  Karenina  falls  well  before  the 
end  of  the  book.  In  Anna  Karenina,  as  in  War  and 
Peace,  the  Russian  novelist  conveys  to  every  reader 
an  invincible  conviction  of  the  unbreakable  con- 
tinuity of  the  life  of  the  race.  The  last  words  of 
Anna  Karenina  are  not  those  which  describe  Anna's 
death  under  the  car  wheels  but  the  infinitely  hope- 
ful words  of  Levin : 

"I  shall  continue  to  be  vexed  with  Ivan  the  coach- 
man, and  get  into  useless  discussions,  and  express 
my  thoughts  blunderingly.  I  shall  always  be  blam- 
ing my  wife  for  what  annoys  me,  and  repenting  at 
once.  I  shall  always  feel  a  certain  barrier  between 
the  Holy  of  Holies  of  my  inmost  soul,  and  the  souls 
of  others,  even  my  wife's.  I  shall  continue  to  pray 
without  being  able  to  explain  to  myself  why.  But 
my  whole  life,  every  moment  of  my  life,  independ- 
ently of  whatever  may  happen  to  me,  will  be,  not 
meaningless  as  before,  but  full  of  the  deep  meaning 
which  I  shall  have  the  power  to  impress  upon  it." 


1 62  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


It  is  because  they  appeal  so  strongly  and  simply 
and  directly  to  our  instinctive  desires  that  the  stories 
of  Jack  London  are  so  popular;  it  is  their  perfect 
appeal  to  our  social  instinct  that  makes  the  tales 
of  O.  Henry  sell  thousands  of  copies  month  after 
month.  Not  even  Dickens  transcended  O.  Henry 
in  the  perfection  of  this  appeal;  and  O.  Henry  set 
the  right  value  on  Dickens  as  at  least  one  of  his 
stories  shows. 

Civilization  and  education  refine  man's  instinc- 
tive desires,  modify  the  paths  they  take,  but  do  not 
weaken  them  perceptibly  from  generation  to  gen- 
eration except  in  a  few  individual  cases.  Read  the 
second  chapter  of  Harold  Bell  Wright's  The  Shep- 
herd of  the  Hills  and  observe  the  tremendous  call 
to  the  instinct  of  race  perpetuation,  prefaced  by  a 
character's  comment  on  the  careless  breeding  of  man 
as  contrasted  with  man's  careful  breeding  of  ani- 
mals. And  if  you  think  the  appeal  is  crude,  be  very 
sure  of  this:  The  crudity  is  in  yourself,  in  the  in- 
stinct that  you  are  not  accustomed  to  have  set  vi- 
brating with  such  healthy  vigor. 

lO 

All  this  deals  with  broadest  fundamentals.  But 
they  are  what  the  publisher,  judging  his  manuscript, 


The  Best  Seller  163 

must  fathom.  They  are  deeper  down  than  the  sales 
manager  need  go,  or  the  bookseller;  deeper  than 
the  critic  need  ordinarily  descend  in  his  examina- 
tion into  the  book's  qualities. 

Ordinarily  it  will  be  enough  for  the  purpose  to 
analyze  a  story  along  the  lines  of  human  instinct 
as  it  has  been  modified  by  our  society  and  our  sur- 
roundings and  conventionalized  by  habit.  The  pub- 
lishers of  Eleanor  H.  Porter's  novel  Oh,  Money! 
Money!  were  not  only  wholly  correct  but  quite  suf- 
ficiently acute  in  their  six  reasons  for  predicting — 
on  the  character  of  the  story  alone — a  big  sale. 

The  first  of  these  was  that  the  yarn  dealt  with  the 
getting  and  spending  of  money,  "the  most  interest- 
ing subject  in  the  world,"  asserted  the  publishers — 
and  while  society  continues  to  be  organized  on  its 
present  basis  their  assertion  is.  as  regards  great 
masses  of  mankind,  a  demonstrable  fact. 

The  second  reason  was  allied  to  the  first;  the 
story  would  "set  every  reader  thinking  how  he 
would  spend  the  money."  And  the  third :  it  was  a 
Cinderella  story,  giving  the  reader  "the  joy  of 
watching  a  girl  who  has  never  been  fairly  treated 
come  out  on  top  in  spite  of  all  odds."  This  is  a 
powerful  appeal  to  the  modified  instinct  of  self- 
preservation.  The  fourth  reason — "the  scene  is  laid 
in  a  little  village  and  the  whole  book  is  a  gem  of 
country  life  and  shrewd  Yankee  philosophy" — an- 
swers to  the  social  hunger  in  the  human  heart. 


164  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Fifth :  **A  charming  love  theme  with  a  happy  end- 
ing." Sixth:  "The  story  teaches  an  unobtrusive 
lesson  .  .  .  that  happiness  must  come  from  within, 
and  that  money  cannot  buy  it."  To  go  behind  such 
reasons  is,  for  most  minds,  not  to  clarify  but  to  con- 
fuse. Folks  feel  these  things  and  care  nothing 
about  the  source  of  the  river  of  feeling. 

II 

With  the  non-fictional  book  the  internal  factor 
making  for  large  sales  is  as  diverse  as  the  kinds 
of  non-fictional  volumes.  A  textbook  on  a  hitherto 
untreated  subject  of  sudden  interest  to  many  thou- 
sands of  readers  has  every  prospect  of  a  large  sale ; 
but  this  is  not  the  kind  of  internal  factor  that  a 
publisher  is  likely  to  err  in  judging!  Any  alert 
business  man  acquiring  correct  information  will 
profit  by  such  an  opportunity. 

But  there  is  a  book  called  In  Tune  with  the  In- 
finite, the  work  of  a  man  named  Ralph  Waldo 
Trine,  which  has  sold,  at  this  writing,  some  530,000 
copies,  having  been  translated  into  eighteen  lan- 
guages. A  man  has  been  discovered  sitting  on  the 
banks  of  the  Yukon  reading  it;  it  has  been  observed 
in  shops  and  little  railway  stations  in  Burmah  and 
Ceylon.  This  is  what  is  called,  not  at  all  badly,  an 
"inspirational  book."  Don't  you  think  a  publisher 
might  well  have  erred  in  judging  that  manuscript? 


The  Best  Seller  165 

Mr.  Trine's  booklet,  The  Greatest  Thing  Ever 
Known,  has  sold  160,000  copies;  his  book  What 
All  the  World's  A-Seeking,  is  in  its  138,000th.  It 
will  not  do  to  overlook  the  attractiveness  of  these 
titles.  What,  most  people  will  want  to  know,  is 
"the  greatest  thing  ever  known"  ?  And  it  is  human 
to  suppose  that  what  you  are  seeking  is  what  all  the 
world  is  after,  and  to  want  to  read  a  book  that  holds 
out  an  implied  promise  to  help  you  get  it. 

The  tremendous  internal  factor  of  these  books 
of  Mr.  Trine's  is  that  they  articulate  simple  (but 
often  beautiful)  ideas  that  lie  in  the  minds  of  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  men  and  women,  ideas  un- 
formulated and  by  the  hundred  thousand  unutter- 
able. For  any  man  who  can  say  the  thing  that  is 
everywhere  felt,  the  audience  is  limitless. 

In  autobiography  a  truly  big  sale  is  not  possible 
unless  the  narrative  has  the  fundamental  qualities 
we  have  designated  as  necessary  in  the  fictional  best 
seller.  All  the  popular  autobiographies  are  stories 
that  appeal  powerfully  to  our  instinctive  desires  and 
this  is  the  fact  with  such  diverse  revelations  as  those 
of  Benjamin  Franklin  and  Benvenuto  Cellini,  Jean 
Jacques  Rousseau  and  Henry  Adams.  The  sum  of 
the  instinctive  desires  is  always  overwhelmingly  in 
favor  of  normal  human  existences.  For  this  rea- 
son the  predetermined  audience  of  Mr.  Tarking- 
ton's  Conquest  of  Canaan  is  many  times  greater 
than  that  of  Mr.  Dreiser's  Sister  Carrie.     A  mo- 


1 66  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

merit's  reflection  will  show  that  this  is  inevitable, 
since  these  instinctive  desires  of  ours  are  so  many 
resistless  forces  exerted  simultaneously  on  us  and 
combining,  in  a  period  of  years,  to  make  a  single 
resultant  force  impelling  us  to  lead  normal,  sane, 
"healthy"  and  wholesome  lives.  On  such  lives, 
lived  by  the  vast  majority  of  men  and  women  every- 
where, the  security  of  every  form  of  human  soci- 
ety depends ;  indeed,  the  continued  existence  of  man 
on  the  face  of  the  earth  is  dependent  upon  them. 
You  may  say  that  Rousseau,  Cellini,  Marie  Bash- 
kirtsefif,  even  Franklin  and  Henry  Adams,  led  ex- 
istences far  from  normal.  The  answer  is  that  we 
accept  the  stories  of  their  lives  in  fact  where  we 
(or  most  of  us)  would  never  accept  them  in  fic- 
tion. We  know  that  these  lives  were  lived ;  and  the 
very  circumstance  that  they  were  abnormal  lives 
makes  us  more  eager  to  know  about  and  understand 
them.  What  most  of  us  care  for  most  is  such  a 
recital  as  Hamlin  Garland's  A  Son  of  the  Middle 
Border.  The  secret  of  the  influence  of  the  life  of 
Abraham  Lincoln  upon  the  American  mind  and 
the  secret  of  the  appeal  made  by  Theodore  Roose- 
velt, the  man,  to  his  countrymen  in  general  during 
his  lifetime  is  actually  one  and  the  same — the  tri- 
umph of  normal  lives,  lived  normally,  lived  up  to 
the  hilt,  and  overshadowing  almost  everything  else 
contemporary  with  them.  Such  men  vindicate  com- 
mon lives,  however  humbly  lived.     We  see,  as  in 


The  Best  Seller  167 


an  apocalyptic  vision,  what  any  one  of  us  may  be- 
come; and  in  so  far  as  any  one  of  us  has  become  so 
great  we  all  of  us  share  in  his  greatness. 

12 

But  perhaps  the  greatest  element  in  predetermin- 
ing the  possible  audience  for  a  non-fiction  book  is 
its  timeliness.  Important,  often  enough,  in  the  case 
of  particular  novels,  the  matter  of  timeliness  is  much 
more  so  with  all  other  books  soever.  It  cannot  be 
overlooked  in  autobiography;  The  Education  of 
Henry  Adams  attracted  a  great  host  of  readers  in 

19 1 8  and  19 19  because  it  became  accessible  to  them 
in  1918  and  not  in   1913  or  1929.     In   1918  and 

1 919  the  minds  of  men  were  peculiarly  troubled. 
Especially  about  education.  H.  G,  Wells  was  ar- 
ticulating the  disastrous  doubts  that  beset  numbers 
of  us,  first,  in  Joan  and  Peter,  with  its  subtitle,  The 
Story  of  an  Education,  drawing  up  an  indictment 
which,  whatever  its  bias,  distortion  and  unfairness 
yet  contained  a  lot  of  terrible  truth;  and  then,  in 
The  Undying  Fire,  dedicated  "to  all  schoolmasters 
and  schoolmistresses  and  every  teacher  in  the 
world,"  returning  to  the  subject,  but  this  time  con- 
structively. Yes,  a  large  number  of  persons  were 
thinking  about  education  in  1918-19,  and  the  iron- 
ical attitude  of  Henry  Adams  toward  his  own  was 
of  keenest  interest  to  them. 


1 68  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

13 

We  have  discussed  the  internal  factor  which 
makes  for  a  big  sale  in  books  rather  sketchily  be- 
cause, as  a  whole,  book  publishers  can  tell  it  when 
they  see  it  (all  that  is  necessary)  even  though  it  may 
puzzle  authors  who  haven't  mastered  it.  So  far  as 
authors  are  concerned  we  believe  that  this  factor  can, 
in  many  instances,  be  mastered.  The  enterprise  is 
not  different  from  developing  a  retentive  memory, 
or  skill  over  an  audience  in  public  speaking;  but  as 
with  both  these  achievements  no  short  cut  is  really 
possible  and  advice  and  suggestion  (you  can't  hon- 
estly call  it  instruction)  can  go  but  a  little  way.  No 
end  of  nonsense  has  been  uttered  on  the  subject  of 
what  it  is  in  books  that  makes  them  sell  well,  and 
nonsense  will  not  cease  to  be  uttered  about  it  while 
men  write.  What  is  of  vastly  more  consequence 
than  any  effort  to  exploit  the  internal  factor  in  best 
sellers  is  the  failure  to  make  every  book  published 
sell  its  best.  If,  in  general,  books  sell  not  more  than 
one-quarter  the  number  of  copies  they  should  sell, 
an  estimate  to  which  we  adhere,  then  the  immediate 
and  largest  gain  to  publishers,  authors  and  public 
will  be  in  securing  100  per  cent,  sales. 

14 

A  word  in  closing  about  the  familiar  argument 
that  the  habits  of  our  people  have  changed,  that 


The  Best  Seller  169 


they  no  longer  have  time  to  read  books,  that  motor- 
ing and  movies  have  usurped  the  place  of  reading. 

Intercommunication  is  not  a  luxury  but  a  neces- 
sity. Transportation  is  only  a  means  of  intercom- 
munication. As  the  means  of  intercommunication 
— books,  newspapers,  mail  services,  railroads,  air- 
craft, telephones,  automobiles,  motion  pictures — 
multiply  the  use  of  each  and  every  one  increases  with 
one  restriction  :  A  new  means  of  intercommunication 
paralleling  but  greatly  improving  an  existing  means 
will  largely  displace  it — as  railroads  have  largely 
superseded  canals. 

As  a  means  of  a  particular  and  indispensable  kind 
of  intercommunication  nothing  has  yet  appeared 
that  parallels  and  at  the  same  time  decidedly  im- 
proves upon  books.  Newspapers  and  magazines  do 
not  and  cannot,  though  they  most  nearly  offer  the 
same  service.  You  cannot  go  in  your  Ford  to  hear 
from  the  lips  of  Mr.  Tarkington  his  new  novel  and 
seeing  it  on  the  screen  isn't  the  same  thing  as  read- 
ing it — as  we  all  know.  And  until  some  inventor 
enables  us  to  sit  down  with  an  author  and  get  his 
story  whole,  at  our  own  convenience  and  related  in 
his  own  words,  by  some  device  much  more  attrac- 
tive than  reading  a  book, — why,  until  then  books 
will  be  bought  and  read  in  steadily  increasing  num- 
bers. For  with  its  exercise  the  taste  for  intercom- 
munication intensifies.  To  have  been  somewhere 
is  to  want  to  read  about  it,  to  have  read  about  a 


170  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

place  is  to  want  to  go  there  in  innumerable  in- 
stances. It  is  a  superficial  view  that  sees  in  the 
spread  of  automobiles  and  motion  pictures  an  ar- 
rest of  reading.  As  time  goes  on  and  more  and 
more  people  read  books,  both  absolutely  and  rela- 
tively to  the  growth  of  populations,  shall  we  hear 
a  wail  that  people's  habits  have  changed  and  that 
the  spread  of  book-reading  has  checked  the  spread' 
of  automobiling  and  lessened  the  attendance  at  the 
picture  shows?  Possibly  we  shall  hear  that  out- 
cry but  we  doubt  it;  nor  does  our  doubt  rest  upon 
any  feeling  that  books  will  not  be  increasingly  read. 


WRITING   A    NOVEL 


VIII 


WRITING   A    NOVEL 


THERE  are  at  least  as  many  ways  of  writing 
a  novel  as  there  are  novelists  and  doubtless 
there  are  more;  for  it  is  to  be  presumed  that  every 
novelist  varies  somewhat  in  his  methods  of  labor. 
The  literature  on  the  business  of  novel-writing  is 
not  extensive.  Some  observations  and  advice  on 
the  part  of  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  are,  indeed,  about 
all  the  average  reader  encounters;  we  have  forgot- 
ten whether  they  are  embedded  in  The  Truth  About 
An  Author  or  in  that  other  masterpiece.  How  to  Live 
on  2,400  Words  a  Day.  It  may  be  remarked  that 
there  is  no  difficulty  in  living  on  2,400  words  a  day, 
none  at  all,  where  the  writer  receives  five  cents  a 
word  or  better. 

But  there  we  go,  talking  about  money,  a  shame- 
ful subject  that  has  only  a  backstairs  relation  to 
Art.  Let  us  ascend  the  front  staircase  together, 
first.  Let  us  enter  the  parlor  of  Beauty-Is-T ruth- 
Truth-Beauty,  which,  the  poet  assured  us,  is  all  we 
know  or  need  to  know.  Let  us  seat  ourselves  in 
lovely  aesthetic  surroundings.     If  later  we  have  to 

173 


174  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

go  out  the  back  way  maybe  we  can  accomplish  it 
unobserved. 

There  are  only  three  motives  for  writing  a  novel. 
The  first  is  to  satisfy  the  writer's  self,  the  second 
is  to  please  or  instruct  other  persons,  the  third  is 
to  earn  money.  We  will  consider  these  motives  in 
order. 


The  best  novels  are  written  from  a  blending  of 
all  three  motives.  But  it  is  doubtful  if  a  good 
novel  has  ever  been  written  in  which  the  desire  to 
satisfy  some  instinct  in  himself  was  not  present 
in  the  writer's  purpose. 

Just  what  this  instinct  is  can't  so  easily  be  an- 
swered. Without  doubt  the  greatest  part  of  it 
is  the  instinct  of  paternity.  Into  the  physiological 
aspects  of  the  subject  we  shall  not  enter,  though 
they  are  supported  by  a  considerable  body  of  evi- 
dence. The  longing  to  father — or  mother — certain 
fictitious  characters  is  not  often  to  be  denied. 
Sometimes  the  story  as  a  story,  as  an  entity,  is 
the  beloved  child  of  its  author.  Did  not  Dickens 
father  Little  Nell?  How,  do  you  suppose,  Barrie 
has  thought  of  himself  in  relation  to  some  of  his 
youngsters?  Any  one  who  has  read  Lore  of  Pro- 
serpine not  only  believes  in  fairies  but  understands 
the  soul  of  Maurice  Hewlett.     The  relation  of  the 


Writing  a  Novel  175 

creator  of  a  story  to  his  persons  is  not  necessarily 
parental.     It  is  always  intensely  human. 

O.  Henry  was  variously  a  Big  Brother  (before 
the  Big  Brothers  had  been  thought  of),  a  father, 
an  uncle,  a  friend,  a  distant  cousin,  a  mere  ac- 
quaintance, a  sworn  enemy  of  his  people.  It  has 
to  be  so.  For  the  writer  lives  among  the  people 
he  creates.  The  cap  of  Fortunatus  makes  him  in- 
visible to  them  but  he  is  always  there — not  to  inter- 
fere with  them  nor  to  shape  their  destinies  but  to 
watch  them  come  together  or  fly  apart,  to  hear  what 
they  say,  to  guess  what  they  think  ( from  what  they 
say  and  from  the  way  they  behave),  to  worry  over 
them,  applaud  them,  frown;  but  forever  as  a  re- 
corder. 


None  of  the  author's  troubles  must  appear  in 
the  finished  record.  Still  wearing  Fortunatus's  cap 
he  is  required  to  be  as  invisible  to  the  reader  as  to 
the  people  he  describes.  There  are  exceptions  to 
this  rule.  Dickens  was  the  most  notable.  Many 
readers  prefer  to  have  a  tale  told  them  by  a  narra- 
tor frankly  prejudiced  in  favor  of  some  of  the 
characters  and  against  others.  Many — ^but  not  a 
majority. 

In  the  best  novel  that  Booth  Tarkington  has  so 
far  written,  The  Flirt,  the  dominating  figure  is  a 
heartless  young  woman  to  whom  the  reader  con- 


176  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

tinuously  itches  to  administer  prussic  acid  in  a  fatal 
dose.  But  Mr.  Tarkington  does  not  scald  Cora 
Madison  with  boiling  invective  nor  blister  her  with 
hot  irony.  He  relates  her  doings  in  the  main 
almost  dispassionately;  and  set  forth  thus  nakedly 
they  are  more  damnable  than  any  amount  of  sound 
and  fury  could  make  them  appear  to  be.  Mr. 
Tarkington  does  not  wave  the  prussic  acid  bottle, 
though  here  and  there,  distilled  through  his  narra- 
tive and  perceptible  more  in  the  things  he  selects  to 
tell  about  than  in  his  manner  of  telling  them,  the 
reader  is  conscious  of  a  faint  odor  of  almond  blos- 
soms, signifying  that  the  author  has  uncorked  the 
acid  bottle — perhaps  that  his  restraint  in  not  empty- 
ing it  may  be  the  more  emphasized. 

May  we  set  things  down  a  little  at  random? 
Then  let  us  seize  this  moment  to  point  out  to  the 
intending  novel  writer  some  omissions  in  The  Flirt. 
Our  pupil  will,  when  he  comes  to  write  his  novel, 
be  certain  to  think  of  the  "strong  scenes."  He  will 
be  painfully  eager  to  get  them  down.  It  is  these 
scenes  that  will  "grip"  the  reader  and  assure  his 
book  of  a  sale  of  100,000  copies. 

Battle,  murder  and  sudden  death  are  generally 
held  to  be  the  very  meat  of  a  strong  scene.  But 
when  the  drunkard  Ray  Vilas,  Cora  Madison's  dis- 
carded lover,  shoots  down  Valentine  Corliss  and 
then  kills  himself,  Mr.  Tarkington  does  not  fill 
pages  with  it.     He  takes  scarce  fifteen  lines — per- 


Writing  a  Novel  177 

haps  a  little  over  100  words — to  tell  of  the  double 
slaying.  Nor  does  he  relate  what  Ray  Vilas  and 
Cora  said  to  each  other  in  that  last  interview  which 
immediately  preceded  the  crime.  "Probably,"  says 
Mr.  Tarkington,  "Cora  told  him  the  truth,  all  of 
it;  though  of  course  she  seldom  told  quite  the  truth 
about  anything  in  which  she  herself  was  concerned" 
— or  words  to  that  effect. 

Where  oh  where  is  the  strong  scene?  Ah,  one 
man's  strength  is  another's  weakness.  The  Flirt 
is  full  of  strong  scenes  but  they  are  infrequently  the 
scenes  which  the  intending  novel  writer,  reviewing 
his  tale  before  setting  to  work,  would  select  as  the 
most  promising. 


Besides  the  instinct  of  paternity — or  perhaps  in 
place  of  it — the  novelist  may  feel  an  instinct  to 
build  something,  or  to  paint  a  beautiful  picture,  or 
mold  a  lovely  figure.  This  yearning  of  the  artist, 
so-called,  is  sometimes  denoted  by  the  word  "self- 
expression,"  a  misnomer,  if  it  be  not  a  euphuism, 
for  the  longing  to  fatherhood.  There  is  just  as 
much  "self-expression"  in  the  paternity  of  a  boy 
or  a  girl  as  in  the  creation  of  a  book,  a  picture  or 
a  building.  The  child,  in  any  case,  has  innumer- 
able other  ancestors;  you  are  not  the  first  to  have 
written  such  a  book  or  painted  such  a  picture. 


178  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

How  about  the  second  motive  in  novel-writing, 
the  desire  to  please  or  instruct  others?  The  only- 
safe  generalization  about  it  seems  to  be  this:  A 
novel  written  exclusively  from  this  motive  will  be 
a  bad  novel.  A  novel  is  not,  above  everything,  a 
didactic  enterprise.  Yet  even  those  enterprises  of 
the  human  race  which  are  in  their  essence  purely 
didactic,  designed  "to  warn,  to  comfort,  to  com- 
mand," such  as  sermons  and  lessons  in  school,  sel- 
dom achieve  their  greatest  possible  effect  if  instruc- 
tion or  improvement  be  the  preacher's  or  teacher's 
unadorned  and  unconcealed  and  only  purpose. 

Take  a  school  lesson.  Teachers  who  get  the 
best  results  are  invariably  found  to  have  added 
some  element  besides  bare  instruction  to  their  work. 
Sometimes  they  have  made  the  lesson  entertaining; 
sometimes  they  have  exercised  that  imponderable 
thing  we  call  "personal  magnetism";  sometimes 
they  have  supplied  an  incentive  to  learn  that  didn't 
exist  in  the  lesson  itself. 

Take  a  sermon.  If  the  auditor  does  not  feel 
the  presence  in  it  of  something  besides  the  mere 
intelligence  the  words  convey  the  sermon  leaves  the 
auditor  cold. 

Pure  intellect  is  not  a  force  in  human  affairs. 
Bach  wrote  music  with  a  very  high  intellectual  con- 
tent but  the  small  leaven  of  sublime  melody  is  pres- 
ent in  his  work  that  lasts  through  the  centuries. 
Shakespeare  and  Beethoven  employed  intellect  and 


Writing  a  Novel  179 

emotionalism  in  the  proportion  of  fifty-fifty.  Sir 
Joshua  Reynolds  mixed  his  paint  "with  brains,  sir"; 
but  the  significant  thing  is  that  Sir  Joshua  did  not 
use  only  gray  matter  on  his  palette.  Those  who 
economize  on  emotionalism  in  one  direction  usually 
make  up  for  it,  not  always  consciously,  in  another. 
Joseph  Hergesheimer,  writing  Java  Head,  is  very 
sparing  in  the  emotionalism  bound  up  with  action 
and  decidedly  lavish  in  the  emotionahsm  insepar- 
able from  sensuous  coloring  and  "atmosphere." 

No,  a  novel  written  wholly  to  instruct  will  never 
do;  but  neither  will  a  novel  written  entirely  to 
please,  to  give  aesthetic  or  sensuous  enjoyment  to 
the  reader.  Such  a  novel  is  like  a  portion  of  a  fine 
French  sauce — with  nothing  to  spread  it  on.  It  is 
honey  without  a  crust  to  dip. 


Writing  a  novel  purely  to  make  money  has  a 
tainted  air,  thanks  to  the  long  vogue  of  a  false 
tradition.  If  so.  The  Vicar  of  Wakefield  ought  to 
be  banished  from  public  libraries;  for  Goldsmith 
needed  the  money  and  made  no  bones  about  saying 
so.  The  facts  are,  of  course,  unascertainable ;  but 
we  would  be  willing  to  wager,  were  there  any  way 
of  deciding  the  bet,  that  more  novels  of  the  first 
rank  have  been  written  either  solely  or  preponder- 


i8o  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

antly  to  earn  money   than   for  any  other   reason 
whatever. 

It  isn't  writing  for  the  sake  of  the  money  that 
determines  the  merit  of  the  result;  thut  is  settled 
by  two  other  factors,  the  author's  skill  and  the  au- 
thor's conscience.  And  the  word  "skill"  here 
necessarily  includes  each  and  every  endowment  the 
writer  possesses  as  well  as  such  proficiency  as  he 
may  have  acquired. 

Suppose  A.  and  B.  both  to  have  material  for  a 
first-rate  novel.  Both  are  equally  skilled  in  novel 
writing.  Both  are  equally  conscientious.  A.  writes 
his  novel  for  his  own  satisfaction  and  to  please  and 
instruct  others.  He  is  careful  and  honest  about  it. 
He  delights  in  it.  B.  writes  his  novel  purely  to 
make  a  few  thousand  dollars.  He  is,  naturally, 
careful  and  honest  in  doing  the  job;  and  he  prob- 
ably takes  such  pleasure  in  it  as  a  man  may  take 
in  doing  well  anything  he  can  do  well,  from  laying 
a  sewer  to  fiying  an  airplane.  We  submit  that  B.'s 
may  easily  be  the  better  novel.  It  is  true  that  B. 
is  under  a  pressure  that  A.  does  not  know  and  that 
B.'s  work  may  be  affected  in  ways  of  which  he  is 
not  directly  aware  by  the  necessity  to  sell  his  fin- 
ished product.  But  most  of  the  best  work  in  the 
world  is  done  under  some  compulsion  or  other; 
and  it  is  the  sum  of  human  experience  that  the  com- 
pulsion to  do  work  which  will  find  favor  in  the 
eyes  of  the  worker's  fellows  is  the  healthfullest 


Writing  a  Novel  i8i 

compulsion  of  them  all.  Certainly  it  is  more 
healthful  than  the  compulsion  merely  to  please 
yourself.  And  if  B.  is  under  a  pressure  A.'s  dan- 
ger lies  precisely  in  the  fact  that  he  is  not  under  a 
pressure,  or  under  too  slight  a  pressure.  It  is  a 
tenable  hypothesis  that  Flaubert  would  have  been 
a  better  novelist  if  he  had  had  to  make  a  living  by 
his  pen.  Some  indirect  evidence  on  the  point  may 
possibly  be  found  in  the  careers  of  certain  writers 
whose  first  books  were  the  product  of  a  need  to 
buy  bread  and  butter;  and  whose  later  books  were 
the  product  of  no  need  at  all — nor  met  any. 

So  much  for  motives  in  novel-writing.  You 
should  write  (i)  because  you  need  the  money,  (2) 
to  satisfy  your  own  instincts,  and  (3)  to  please  and, 
perchance,  instruct  other  persons. 

Take  a  week  or  two  to  get  your  motives  in  order 
and  then,  and  not  until  then,  read  what  follows, 
which  has  to  do  with  how  you  are  presently  to  pro- 
ceed about  the  business  of  writing  your  novel. 


It  is  settled  that  you  are  going  to  write  a  novel. 
You  have  examined  your  motive  and  found  it  pure 
and  worthy  of  you.  Comes  now  the  great  question 
of  how  to  set  about  the  business. 

At  this  point  let  no  one  rise  up  and  "point  out" 
that  Arnold  Bennett  has  told  how.     Arnold  Ben- 


1 82  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

nett  has  told  how  to  do  everything — how  to  Hve  on 
twenty- four  hours  a  day  (but  not  how  to  enjoy  it), 
how  to  write  books,  how  to  acquire  culture,  how  to 
be  yourself  and  manage  yourself  (in  the  unfor- 
tunate event  that  you  cannot  be  some  one  else  or 
have  no  one,  like  a  wife,  to  manage  you),  how  to 
do  everything,  indeed,  except  rise  up  and  call 
Arnold  Bennett  blessed. 

The  trouble  with  Mr.  Bennett's  directions  is — 
they  won't  work. 

Mr.  Bennett  tells  you  to  write  like  everything  and 
get  as  much  of  your  novel  done  as  possible  before 
the  Era  of  Discouragement  sets  in.  Then,  no  mat- 
ter how  great  your  Moment  of  Depression,  you  will 
be  able  to  stand  beside  the  table,  fondly  stroking  a 
pile  of  pages  a  foot  high,  and  reassure  yourself, 
saying:  "Well,  but  here,  at  least,  is  so  much  done. 
No!  I  cannot  take  my  hand  from  the  plough  now! 
No!  I  must  Go  On.  I  must  complete  my  des- 
tiny." (One's  novel  is  always  one's  Destiny  of 
the  moment.) 

It  sounds  well,  but  the  truth  is  that  when  you 
strike  the  Writer's  Doldrums  the  sight  of  all  that 
completed  manuscript  only  enrages  you  to  the  last 
degree.  You  are  embittered  by  the  spectacle  of  so 
much  effort  wasted.  You  feel  like  tearing  it  up 
or  flinging  it  in  the  wastebasket.  If  you  are  a 
Rudyard  Kipling  or  an  Edna  Ferber,  you  do  that 
thing.     And  your  wife  or  your  mother  carefully  re- 


Writing  a  Novel  183 

trieves  your  Recessional  or  your  Dawn  O'Hara  and 
sends  it  to  the  publisher  who  brings  it  out,  regard- 
less of  expense,  and  sells  a  large  number  of  copies 
— to  the  booksellers,  anyway. 

Mr.  Bennett  also  tells  you  how  to  plan  the  long, 
slow  culminant  movement  of  your  novel;  how  to 
walk  in  the  park  and  compose  those  neat  little  cli- 
maxes which   should   so  desirably  terminate  each 

chapter ;  how  to But  what's  the  use  ?     Let  us 

illustrate  with  a  fable. 

Once  an  American,  meeting  Mr.  Bennett  in  Lon- 
don, saluted  him,  jocularly  (he  meant  it  jocularly) 
with  the  American  Indian  word  of  greeting: 
"How?" 

Mr.  Bennett  immediately  began  to  tell  him  how 
and  the  American  never  got  away  until  George  H. 
Doran,  the  publisher,  who  was  standing  near  by, 
exclaimed : 

"That's  enough,  Enoch,  for  a  dollar  volume!" 

(Mr,  Doran,  knowing  Bennett  well,  calls  him  by 
his  first  name,  a  circumstance  that  should  be  pointed 
out  to  G.  K.  Chesterton,  who  would  evolve  a  touch- 
ing paradox  about  the  familiarity  of  the  unfa- 
miliar.) 

That  will  do  for  Arnold.  If  we  mention  Arnold 
again  it  must  distinctly  be  understood  that  we  have 
reference  to  some  other  Arnold — Benedict  Arnold 
or  Matthew  Arnold  or  Dorothy  Arnold  or  Arnold 
Daly. 


184  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

Well,  to  get  back  (in  order  to  get  forward),  you 
are  about  beginning  your  novel  (nice  locution, 
"about  beginning")  and  are  naturally  taking  all  the 
advice  you  can  get,  if  it  doesn't  cost  prohibitively, 
and  this  we  are  about  to  give  doesn't. 

The  first  thing  for  you  to  do  is  not,  necessarily, 
to  decide  on  the  subject  of  your  novel. 

It  is  not  absolutely  indispensable  to  select  the 
subject  of  a  novel  before  beginning  to  write  it. 
Many  authors  prefer  to  write  a  third  or  a  half  of 
the  novel  before  definitely  committing  themselves 
to  a  particular  theme.  For  example,  take  The  Roll 
Call,  by  Arnold — it  must  have  been  Arnold  Con- 
stable, or  perhaps  it  was  Matthew.  The  Roll  Call 
is  a  very  striking  illustration  of  the  point  we  would 
make.  Somewhere  along  toward  the  end  of  The 
Roll  Call  the  author  decided  that  the  subject  of  the 
novel  should  be  the  war  and  its  effect  on  the  son  of 
Hilda  Lessways  by  her  bigamous  first  husband — 
or,  he  wasn't  exactly  her  husband,  being  a  bigamist, 
but  we  will  let  it  go  at  that.  Now  Hilda  Lessways 
was,  or  became,  the  wife  of  Edwin  Clayhanger; 
and  George  Cannon,  Clayhanger's — would  you  say, 
stepson?  Hilda's  son,  anyway — George  Cannon, 
the  son  of  a  gun — oh,  pardon,  the  son  of  Biga- 
mist Cannon — the  stepson  of,  or  son  of  the 
wife  of,  Edwin  Clayhanger  of  the  Five  Towns 
— George  Cannon  .    .    .     Where  were  we?   .    .    . 


Writing  a  Novel  185 

Hilda   Lessways   Clayhanger,   the — well,   wife — of 
Bigamist  Cannon.    .    .    . 

The  relationships  in  this  novel  are  very  con- 
fusing, like  the  novel  and  the  subject  of  it,  but  if 
you  can  read  the  book  you  will  see  that  it  illustrates 
our  point  perfectly. 


Well,  go  ahead  and  write.  Don't  worry  about 
the  subject.  You  know  how  it  is,  a  person  often 
can't  see  the  forest  for  the  trees.  When  you're 
writing  70,000  words  or  maybe  a  few  more  you 
can't  expect  to  see  your  way  out  of  'em  very  easily. 
When  you  are  out  of  the  trees  you  can  look  back 
and  see  the  forest.  And  when  you  are  out  of  the 
woods  of  words  you  can  glance  over  'em  and  find 
out  what  they  were  all  about. 

However,  the  80,000  words  have  to  be  written, 
and  it  is  up  to  you,  somehow  or  other,  to  set  down 
the  90,000  parts  of  speech  in  a  row.  Now  100,000 
words  cannot  be  written  without  taking  thought. 
Any  one  who  has  actually  inscribed  120,000  words 
knows  that.  Any  one  who  has  written  the  150,000 
words  necessary  to  make  a  good-sized  novel 
(though  William  Allen  White  wouldn't  call  that 
good  measure)  understands  the  terrible  difficulties 
that  confront  a  mortal  when  he  sits  down  to  enter 
upon  the  task  of  authorship,  the  task  of  putting  on 


1 86  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

paper  the  200,000  mono-  or  polysyllables  that  shall 
hold  the  reader  breathless  to  the  end,  if  only  from 
the  difficulty  of  pronouncing  some  of  them. 

Where  to  start?  For  those  who  are  not  yet 
equipped  with  self-starters  we  here  set  down  a  few 
really  first-class  of)enings  for  either  the  spring  or 
fall  novel  trade: 

"Marinda  was  frightened.  When  she  was 
frightened  her  eyes  changed  color.  They  were 
dark  now,  and  glittering  restlessly  like  the  sea  when 
the  wind  hauls  northwest.  Jack  Hathaway,  unfa- 
miliar with  weather  signs,  took  no  heed  of  the  im- 
pending squall.  He  laughed  recklessly,  dangerous- 
ly. .  .  ."   (Story  of  youth  and  struggle,) 

"The  peasant  combed  the  lice  from  his  beard, 
spat  and  said,  grumbling :  'Send  us  ploughs  that  we 
may  till  the  soil  and  save  Russia.  .  .  ,  Send  us 
ploughs.'  "     (ReaHstic  story  of  Russia.) 

"Darkness,  suave,  dense,  enfolding,  lay  over  the 
soft  loam  of  the  fields.  The  girl,  moving  silently 
across  the  field,  felt  the  mystery  of  the  dark;  the 
scent  of  tlie  soil  and  the  caress  of  the  night  alike 
enchanted  her.  Hidden  in  the  folds  of  her  dress, 
clutched  tightly  in  her  fingers,  was  the  ribbon  he 
had  given  her.  With  a  quick  indrawing  of  her 
breath  she  paused,  and,  screened  by  the  utter  black- 
ness that  enveloped  her,  pressed  it  to  her  lips,  .  ,  ." 
(Story  of  the  country-side.  Simple,  trusting  inno- 
cence.    Lots  of  atmosphere.     After  crossing  the 


Writing  a  Novel 


field  the  girl    strikes    across    Haunted    Heath,    a 
description  of  which  fills  the  second  chapter.) 

All  these  are  pretty  safe  bets,  if  you're  terribly 
hard  up.  Think  them  over.  Practise  them  daily 
for  a  few  weeks. 


Now  that  you  have  some  idea  about  writing  a 
novel  it  may  be  as  well  for  you  to  consider  the  con- 
sequences before  proceeding  to  the  irrevocable  act. 

One  of  the  consequences  will  certainly  be  the  dis- 
covery of  many  things  in  the  completed  manuscript 
that  you  never  intended.  This  is  no  frivolous 
allusion  to  the  typographical  errors  you  will  find 
— for  a  typewriter  is  as  capable  of  spoonerisms  as 
the  human  tongue.  We  have  reference  to  things 
that  you  did  not  consciously  put  into  your  narra- 
tive. 

And  first  let  it  be  said  that  many  things  that 
seem  to  you  unconscious  in  the  work  of  skilled 
writers  are  deliberate  art  (as  the  phrase  goes). 
The  trouble  is  that  the  deliberation  usually  spoils 
the  art.  An  example  must  be  had  and  we  will  take 
it  in  a  novel  by  the  gifted  American,  Joseph 
Hergesheimer.  Before  proceeding  further  with 
this  Manual  for  Beginners  read  Java  Head  if  you 
can;  if  not,  never  mind. 

Now  in  Java  Head  the  purpose  of  Mr.  Herges- 
heimer was,  aside  from  the  evocation  of  a  beautiful 


Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 


bit  of  a  vanished  past,  the  deHneation  of  several 
persons  of  whom  one  represented  the  East 
destroyed  in  the  West  and  another  the  West 
destroyed  in  the  East.  Edward  Dunsack,  back  in 
Salem,  Massachusetts,  the  victim  of  the  opium 
habit,  represented  the  West  destroyed  in  the  East; 
the  Chinese  wife  of  Gerrit  Ammidon  represented 
the  East  destroyed  in  the  West.  Mr.  Herges- 
heimer  took  an  artist's  pride  in  the  fact  that  the 
double  destruction  was  accomplished  with  what 
seemed  to  him  the  greatest  possible  economy  of 
means;  almost  the  only  external  agency  employed, 
he  pointed  out,  was  opium.  Very  well;  this  is 
aestheticism,  pure  and  not  so  simple  as  it  looks. 
It  is  a  Pattern.  It  is  a  musical  phrase  or  theme 
presented  as  a  certain  flight  of  notes  in  the  treble, 
repeated  or  echoed  and  inverted  in  the  bass.  It  is 
a  curve  on  one  side  of  a  staircase  balanced  by  a 
curve  on  the  other.  It  is  a  thing  of  symmetry  and 
grace  and  it  is  the  expression,  perfect  in  its  way, 
of  an  idea.  Kipling  expressed  very  much  the  same 
idea  when  he  told  us  that  East  is  East  and  West 
is  West  and  never  the  twain  shall  meet.  Mr. 
Hergesheimer  amplifies  and  extends.  If  the  two 
are  brought  in  contact  each  is  fatal  to  the  other. 
Is  that  all? 

It  is  not  all,  it  is  the  mere  beginning.  When 
you  examine  Java  Head  with  the  Pattern  in  mind 
you  immediately  discover  that  the  Pattern  is  car- 


Writing  a  Novel  189 

ried  out  in  bewildering  detail.  Everything  is  sym- 
metrically arranged.  For  instance,  many  a  reader 
must  have  been  puzzled  and  bewildered  by  the 
heartbreaking  episode  at  the  close  of  the  novel  in 
which  Roger  Brevard  denies  the  delightful  girl 
Sidsall  Ammidon.  The  affair  bears  no  relation  to 
the  currents  of  the  tale;  it  is  just  a  little  eddy  to 
one  side;  it  is  unnecessarily  cruel  and  wounding  to 
our  sensibilities.    Why  have  it  at  all? 

The  answer  is  that  in  his  main  narrative  Mr. 
Hergesheimer  has  set  before  us  Gerrit  Ammidon, 
a  fellow  so  quixotic  that  he  marries  twice  out  of 
sheer  chivalry.  He  has  drawn  for  us  the  fantastic 
scroll  of  such  a  man,  a  sea-shape  not  to  be  matched 
on  shore.  Well,  then,  down  in  the  corner,  he  must 
inscribe  for  us  another  contrasting,  balancing, 
compensating,  miniatured  scroll — a  land-shape  in 
the  person  of  Roger  Brevard  who  is  so  unquixotic 
as  to  offset  Gerrit  Ammidon  completely.  Gerrit 
Ammidon  will  marry  twice  for  incredible  reasons 
and  Roger  Brevard  will  not  even  marry  once  for 
the  most  compelling  of  reasons — love.  The  beauti- 
ful melody  proclaimed  by  the  violins  is  brutally 
parodied  by  the  tubas. 


Is  it  all  right  thus?     It  is  not  all  right  thus  and 
it  never  can  be  so  long  as  life  remains  the  unpat- 


190  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

terned  thing  we  discern  it  to  be.  If  Hfe  were  com- 
pletely patterned  it  would  most  certainly  not  be 
worth  living.  When  we  say  that  life  is  unpatterned 
we  mean,  of  course,  that  we  cannot  read  all  its 
patterns  (we  like  to  assume  that  all  patterns  are 
there,  because  it  comforts  us  to  think  of  a  funda- 
mental Order  and  Symmetry). 

But  so  long  as  life  is  largely  unpatterned,  or  so 
long  as  we  cannot  discern  all  its  patterns,  life  is 
eager,  interesting,  surprising  and  altogether  dis- 
tracting and  lovely  however  bewildering  and  dis- 
tressing, too.  Different  people  take  the  unreadable 
differently.  Some,  like  Thomas  Hardy,  take  it  in 
defiant  bitterness  of  spirit;  some,  like  Joseph 
Conrad,  take  it  in  profound  faith  and  wonder. 
Hardy  sees  the  disorder  that  he  cannot  fathom; 
Conrad  admires  the  design  that  he  can  only  in- 
completely trace.  To  Hardy  the  world  is  a  place 
where — 

"As  flies  to  wanton  boys  are  we  to  the  gods ; 
They  kill  us  for  their  sport." 

To  Conrad  the  world  is  a  place  where  men  may 
continually  make  the  glorious  and  heartening  dis- 
covery that  a  solidarity  exists  among  them;  that 
they  are  united  by  a  bond  as  unbreakable  as  it  is 
mysterious. 

And  to  others,  as  regrettably  to  Mr.  Herges- 
heimer  writing  Java  Head,  the  world  is  a  place 


Writing  a  Novel  191 

where  it  is  momentarily  sufficient  to  trace  casual 
symmetries  without  thought  of  their  relation  to  an 
ineluctable  whole. 

10 

What,  then,  is  the  novelist  to  do?  Is  it  not 
obvious  that  he  must  not  busy  himself  too  carefully 
with  the  business  of  patterning  the  things  he  has 
to  tell?  For  the  moment  he  has  traced  everything 
out  nicely  and  beautifully  he  may  know  for  a 
surety  that  he  has  cut  himself  off  from  the  larger 
design  of  Life.  He  has  got  his  Httle  corner  of  the 
Oriental  rug  all  mapped  out  with  the  greatest  ex- 
actitude. But  he  has  lost  touch  with  the  bigger 
intricacy  beyond  his  corner.  It  is  a  prayer  rug.  He 
had  better  kneel  down  and  pray. 

Now  there  are  novels  in  which  no  pattern  at  all 
is  traced;  and  these  are  as  bad  as  those  which 
minutely  map  a  mere  corner.  These  are  meaning- 
less and  confused  stories  in  which  nobody  can 
discern  any  cause  or  effect,  any  order  or  law,  any 
symmetry  or  proportion  or  expressed  idea.  These 
are  the  novels  which  have  been  justified  as  a  "slice 
of  life"  and  which  have  brought  into  undeserved 
disrepute  the  frequently  painstaking  manner  of 
their  telling.  The  trouble  is  seldom  primarily,  as 
so  many  people  think,  with  the  material  but  with 
its  presentation.  You  may  take  almost  any  ma- 
terial you  like  and  so  present  it  as  to  make  it  mean 


192  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

something;  and  you  may  also  take  almost  any 
material  you  like  and  so  present  it  as  to  make  it 
mean  nothing  to  anybody.  A  heap  of  bricks  is 
meaningless;  but  the  same  bricks  are  intelligible 
expressed  as  a  building  of  whatever  sort,  or  merely 
as  a  sidewalk  with  zigzags,  perhaps,  of  a  vari- 
color. 

The  point  we  would  make — and  we  might  as 
well  try  to  drive  it  home  without  further  ineffectual 
attempts  at  illustration — is  that  you  must  do  some 
patterning  with  your  material,  whether  bricks  for 
a  building  or  lives  for  a  story;  but  if  you  pattern 
too  preciously  your  building  will  be  contemptible 
and  your  story  without  a  soul.  In  your  building 
you  must  not  be  so  decided  as  to  leave  no  play  for 
another's  imagination,  contemplating  the  structure. 
In  your  narrative  you  must  not  be  so  dogmatic 
about  two  and  two  adding  to  four  as  to  leave  no 
room  for  a  wild  speculation  that  perhaps  they  came 
to  five.  For  it  is  not  the  certainty  that  two  and  two 
have  always  made  four  but  the  possibility  that 
some  day  they  may  make  five  that  makes  life  worth 
living — and  guessing  about  on  the  printed  page. 

II 

Perhaps  the  most  serious  consequence  of  writing 
a  novel  is  the  revelation  of  yourself  it  inevitably 
entails. 


Writing  a  Novel  193 

We  are  not  thinking,  principally,  of  the  discovery 
you  will  make  of  the  size  of  your  own  soul.  We 
have  in  mind  the  laying  bare  of  yourself  to  others. 

Of  course  you  do  reveal  yourself  to  yourself 
when  you  write  a  book  to  reveal  others  to  others. 
It  has  been  supposed  that  a  man  cannot  say  or  do 
a  thing  which  does  not  expose  his  nature.  This  is 
nonsense;  you  do  not  expose  your  nature  every 
time  you  take  the  subway,  though  a  trip  therein 
may  very  well  be  an  index  to  your  manners.  The 
fact  remains  that  no  man  ever  made  a  book  or  a 
play  or  a  song  or  a  poem,  with  any  command  of  the 
technique  of  his  work,  without  in  some  measure 
giving  himself  away.  Where  this  is  not  enough 
of  an  inducement  some  other,  such  as  a  tin  whistle 
with  every  bound  copy,  is  offered ;  no  small  addition 
as  it  enables  the  reviewer  to  declare,  hand  on  heart, 
that  "this  story  is  not  to  be  whistled  down  the 
wind."  Some  have  doubted  Bernard  Shaw's  Irish- 
ism, which  seems  the  queerer  as  nearly  everything 
he  has  written  has  carried  a  shillelagh  concealed 
between  the  covers.  Recently  Frank  K.  Reilly  of 
Chicago  gave  away  one-cent  pieces  to  advertise  a 
book  called  Penny  of  Top  Hill  Trail.  He  might 
be  said,  and  in  fact  he  hereby  is  said,  thus  to  have 
coppered  his  risk  in  publishing  it.  .  .  .  All  of 
which  is  likely  to  be  mistaken  for  jesting.  Let  us 
therefore  jest  that  we  may  be  taken  with  utmost 
seriousness. 


194  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

The  revelation  of  yourself  to  yourself,  which  the 
mere  act  of  writing  a  novel  brings  to  pass,  may 
naturally  be  either  pleasant  or  unpleasant.  Very 
likely  it  is  unpleasant  in  a  majority  of  instances, 
a  condition  which  need  not  necessarily  reflect  upon 
our  poor  human  nature.  If  we  did  not  aspire  so 
high  for  ourselves  we  should  not  suffer  such  awful 
disappointments  on  finding  out  where  we  actually 
get  off.  The  only  moral,  if  there  is  one,  lies  in  our 
ridiculous  aim.  Imagine  the  sickening  of  heart 
with  which  Oscar  Wilde  contemplated  himself  after 
completing  The  Picture  of  Dorian  Grey!  And 
imagine  the  lift  it  must  have  given  him  to  look 
within  himself  as  he  worked  at  The  Ballad  of  Read- 
ing Gaol!  The  circumstances  of  life  and  even  the 
actual  conduct  of  a  man  are  not  necessarily  here  or 
there — or  anywhere  at  all — in  this  intimate  con- 
templation. There  is  one  mirror  before  which  we 
never  pose.  God  made  man  in  His  own  image. 
God  made  His  own  image  and  put  it  in  every  man. 

It  is  there!  Nothing  in  Hfe  transcends  the 
wonder  of  the  moment  when,  each  for  himself,  we 
make  this  discovery.  Then  comes  the  struggle  to 
remold  ourselves  nearer  to  our  heart's  desire.  It 
succeeds  or  it  doesn't;  perhaps  it  succeeds  only 
slightly;  any^vay  we  try  for  it.  The  sleeper,  twist- 
ing and  turning,  dreaming  and  struggling,  is  the 
perfect  likeness  of  ourselves  in  the  waking  hours 
of  our  whole  earthly  existence.    Because  they  have 


Writing  a  Novel  195 

seen  this  some  have  thought  life  no  better  than  a 
nightmare.  Voltaire  suggested  that  the  earth  and 
all  that  dwelt  thereon  was  only  the  bad  dream  of  a 
god  on  some  other  planet.  We  would  point  out 
the  bright  side  of  this  possibility :  It  presupposes 
the  existence  somewhere  of  a  mince  pie  so  delicious 
and  so  powerful  as  to  evoke  the  likenesses  of 
Caesar  and  Samuel  Gompers,  giraffes,  Mr.  Taft, 
violets,  Mr.  Roosevelt,  Piotr  Hitch  Tchaikovski, 
Billy  Sunday,  Wu-Ting  Fang,  Helen  of  Troy  and 
Mother  Jones,  groundhogs,  H.  G.  Wells;  perhaps 
Bolshevism  is  the  last  writhe.  Mince  pie,  unwisely 
eaten  instead  of  the  dietetic  nectar  and  ambrosia, 
may  well  explain  the  whole  confused  universe. 
And  you  and  I — we  can  create  another  universe, 
equally  exciting,  by  eating  mince  pie  to-night !  .  .  . 
You  see  there  is  a  bright  side  to  everything,  for  the 
mince  pie  is  undoubtedly  of  a  heavenly  flavor. 

We  were  saying,  when  sidetracked  by  the  neces- 
sity of  explaining  the  universe,  that  the  self-revela- 
tion which  writing  a  book  entails  is  in  most  cases 
depressing,  but  not  by  any  means  always  so.  Bos- 
well  was  not  much  of  a  man  judged  by  the  stand- 
ards of  his  own  day  or  ours,  either  one,  yet  Bos- 
well  knew  himself  better  than  he  knew  Dr.  Johnson 
by  the  time  he  had  finished  his  life  of  the  Doctor. 
It  must  have  bucked  him  up  immensely  to  know 
that  he  was  at  least  big  enough  himself  to  measure 
a  bigger  man  up  and  down,  in  and  out,  criss-cross 


196  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

and  sideways,  setting  down  the  complicated  result 
without  any  error  that  the  human  intelligence  can 
detect.  It  must  have  appeased  the  ironical  soul  of 
Henry  Adams  to  realise  that  he  was  one  of  the 
very  few  men  who  had  never  fooled  himself  about 
himself,  and  that  evidence  of  his  phenomenal 
achievement  in  the  shape  of  the  book  The  Educa- 
tion of  Henry  Adams,  would  survive  him  after  his 
death — or  at  least,  after  the  difficulties  of  com- 
municating with  those  on  earth  had  noticeably  in- 
creased (we  make  this  wise  modification  lest  some- 
one match  Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  Raymond,  or  Life 
After  Death  with  a  volume  called  Henry,  or  Re- 
Ediication  After  Death). 

It  must  have  sent  a  thrill  of  pleasure  through  the 
by  no  means  insensitive  frame  of  Joseph  Conrad 
when  he  discovered,  on  completing  Nostromo,  that 
he  had  a  profounder  insight  into  the  economic  bases 
of  modern  social  and  political  affairs  than  nine- 
tenths  of  the  professional  economists  and  sociolo- 
gists— plus  a  knowledge  of  the  human  heart  that 
they  have  never  dreamed  worth  while.  For  Con- 
rad saw  clearly,  and  so  saw  simply;  the  "silver  of 
the  mine"  of  this,  his  greatest  story,  was,  it  is  true, 
an  incorruptible  metal,  but  it  could  and  did  alter 
the  corruptible  nature  of  man — and  would  continue 
to  do  so  through  generation  after  generation  long 
after  his  Mediterranean  sailor-hero  had  become 
dust. 


Writing  a  Novel  197 

Even  in  the  case  of  the  humble  and  unknown 
writer  whose  completed  manuscript,  after  many 
tedious  journeys,  comes  home  to  him  at  last,  to 
be  re-read  regretfully  but  with  an  undying  belief 
not  so  much  in  the  work  itself  as  in  what  it  was 
meant  to  express  and  so  evidently  failed  to — even 
in  his  case  the  great  consolation  is  the  attestation 
of  a  creed.  Very  bad  men  have  died,  as  does  the 
artist  in  Shaw's  The  Doctor's  Dilcnma,  voicing 
with  clarity  and  beauty  the  belief  in  which  they 
think  they  have  lived  or  ought  to  have  lived;  but  a 
piece  of  work  is  always  an  actual  living  of  some  part 
of  the  creed  that  is  in  you.  It  may  be  a  failure  but 
it  has,  with  all  its  faults,  a  gallant  quality,  the  quality 
of  the  deed  done,  which  men  have  always  admired, 
and  because  of  which  they  have  invented  those 
things  we  call  words  to  embody  their  praise. 

But  what  of  the  consequences  of  revealing  your- 
self to  others?  Writing  a  novel  will  surely  mean 
that  you  will  incur  them.  We  must  speak  of  them 
briefly;  and  then  we  may  get  on  to  the  thing  for 
which  you  are  doubtless  waiting  with  terrible  pa- 
tience— the  way  to  write  the  novel  itself.  Never 
fear!  If  you  will  but  endure  steadfastly  you  shall 
Know  All. 

12 

"Certainly,  publish  everything,"  commented  the 
New  York   Times  editorially  upon  a  proposal  to 


198  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

give  out  earnings,  or  some  other  detail,  of  private 
businesses.  "All  privacy  is  scandalous,"  added  the 
newspaper.  In  this  satirical  utterance  lies  the  ulti- 
mate justification  for  writing  a  novel. 

All  privacy  is  scandalous.  If  you  don't  believe 
it,  read  some  of  the  prose  of  James  Joyce.  A  Por- 
trait of  The  Artist  As  a  Young  Man  will  do  for  a 
starter.  Ulysses  is  a  follow-up.  H.  G.  Wells  likes 
the  first,  while  deploring  so  much  sewerage  in  the 
open  street.  You  see,  nothing  but  a  sincere  con- 
viction concerning  the  wickedness  of  leaving  any- 
thing at  all  unmentioned  in  public  could  justify 
such  narratives  as  Mr.  Joyce's. 

In  a  less  repulsive  sense,  the  scandal  of  privacy 
is  what  underlies  any  novel  of  what  we  generally 
call  the  "realistic"  sort.  Mr.  Dreiser,  for  instance, 
thinks  it  scandalous  that  we  should  not  know  and 
publicly  proclaim  the  true  nature  of  such  men  as 
Hurstwood  in  his  Sister  Carrie.  Mr.  Hardy  thinks 
it  scandalous  that  the  world  should  not  publicly 
acknowledge  the  purity  of  Tess  Durbeyfield  and 
therefore  he  gives  us  a  book  in  which  she  is,  as  the 
subtitle  says,  "faithfully  presented."  Gene  Strat- 
ton-Porter  thinks  it  scandalous  not  to  tell  the  truth 
about  such  a  boy  as  Freckles.  The  much- 
experienced  Mr.  Tarkington,  stirred  to  his  marrow 
by  what  seems  almost  a  world  conspiracy  to  con- 
done the  insufferable  conceit  of  the  George 
Amber  son  Minafers  among  us,  writes  The  Mag- 


Writing  a  Novel  199 


nificent  Ambersons  to  make  us  confess  how  we  hate 
'em — and  how  our  instinctive  faith  in  them  is 
vindicated  at  last. 

Every  novelist  who  gains  a  public  of  any  size  or 
permanence  deliberately,  and  even  joyfully,  faces 
the  consequences  of  the  revelation  of  himself  to 
some  thousands  of  his  fellow-creatures.  We  don't 
mean  that  he  always  delineates  himself  in  the  per- 
son of  a  character,  or  several  characters,  in  his 
stories.  He  may  do  that,  of  course,  but  the  self- 
exposure  is  generally  much  more  merciless.  The 
novelist  can  withhold  from  the  character  which, 
more  or  less,  stands  for  himself  his  baser  qualities. 
What  he  cannot  withhold  from  the  reader  is  his 
own  mind's  limitations. 

A  novel  is  bounded  by  the  author's  horizons.  If 
a  man  can  see  only  so  far  and  only  so  deep  his 
book  will  show  it.  If  he  cannot  look  abroad,  but 
can  perceive  nothing  beyond  the  nose  on  his  face, 
that  fact  will  be  fully  apparent  to  his  co-spectators 
who  turn  the  pages  of  his  story.  If  he  can  see 
only  certain  colors  those  who  look  on  with  him  will 
be  aware  of  his  defect.  Above  all,  if  he  can  see 
persons  as  all  bad  or  all  good,  all  black  or  all  white, 
he  will  be  hanged  in  effigy  along  with  the  puppets 
he  has  put  on  paper. 

This  is  the  reason  why  every  one  should  write 
a  novel.  There  is  only  one  thing  comparable  with 
it  as  a  means  of  self-immolation.     That,  of  course, 


200  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

is  tenure  of  public  office.  And  as  there  are  not 
nearly  enough  public  offices  to  serve  the  need  of 
individual  discipline,  novelizing  should  be  encour- 
aged, fomented — we  had  almost  said,  made  com- 
pulsory. Compulsion,  however,  defeats  its  own 
ends.  Let  us  elect  to  public  offices,  as  we  would 
choose  to  fill  scholarships,  those  who  cannot, 
through  some  misfortune,  write  novels;  and  let  us 
induce  all  the  other  people  in  the  world  that  we  can 
to  put  pen  to  paper — not  that  they  may  enrich  the 
world  with  immortal  stories,  not  that  they  may 
make  money,  become  famous  or  come  to  know 
themselves,  but  solely  that  we  may  know  them  for 
what  they  are. 

If  Albert  Burleson  had  been  induced  to  write  a 
novel  would  we  have  made  him  a  Congressman 
and  would  President  Wilson  have  made  him  Post- 
master-General? If  William,  sometime  of  Ger- 
many, had  written  a  novel  would  the  Germans  have 
acquiesced  in  his  theory  of  Divine  Right  ?  Georges 
Clemenceau  wrote  novels  and  was  chosen  of  the 
people  to  lead  them.  Hall  Caine  and  Marie  Corelli 
and  Rider  Haggard  and  Arnold  Bennett  have 
written  novels  which  enable  us  to  gauge  them  pretty 
accurately — and  not  one  of  them  has  yet  been  in- 
vited to  help  run  the  League  of  Nations.  The 
reason  is  simple :  We  know  them  too  well. 

All  privacy  is  scandalous.  Thomas  Dixon  says: 
*Tt   is  positively   immoral   that   the   world   should 


Writing  a  Novel  201 

run  on  without  knowing  the  depths  to  which  I  can 
sink.  I  must  write  The  Way  of  a  Man  and  make 
the  world  properly  contemptuous  of  me."  Zona 
Gale  reflects  to  herself  :  "After  all,  with  nothing  but 
these  few  romances  and  these  Friendship  Village 
stories,  people  have  no  true  insight  into  my  real 
tastes,  affinities,  predilections,  qualities  of  mind. 
I  will  write  about  a  fruit  and  pickle  salesman,  an 
ineffectual  sort  of  person  who  becomes,  almost  in- 
voluntarily, a  paperhanger.  That  will  give  them 
the  idea  of  me  they  lack." 

William  Allen  White,  without  consciously  think- 
ing anything  of  the  kind,  is  dimly  aware  that  peo- 
ple generally  have  a  right  to  know  him  as  a  big- 
hearted  man  who  makes  some  mistakes  but  whose 
sympathy  is  with  the  individual  man  and  woman 
and  whose  passion  is  for  social  progress.  The  best 
way  to  make  people  generally  acquainted  with 
William  Allen  White  is  to  write  a  novel — say, 
In  The  Heart  of  a  Fool,  which  they  will  read.  .  .  . 
The  best  way  to  get  to  know  anybody  is  to  get  him 
to  talking  about  somebody  else.  Talk  about  one's 
self  is  a  little  too  self-conscious. 

And  there  you  have  it!  It  is  exactly  because 
such  a  writer  as  H.  G.  Wells  is  in  reality  pretty 
nearly  always  talking  about  himself  that  we  find  it 
so  difficult  to  appraise  him  rightly  on  the  basis  of 
his  novels.  Self-consciousness  is  never  absent 
from  a  Wells  book.     It  is  this  acute  self-conscious- 


202  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ness  that  makes  so  much  of  Henry  James  valueless 
to  the  great  majority  of  readers.  They  cannot  get 
past  it,  or  behind  it.  The  great  test  fails.  Mr. 
James  is  dead,  and  the  only  way  left  to  get  at  the 
truth  of  Mr.  Wells  will  be  to  make  him  Chancellor 
of  the  Exchequer  or,  in  a  socialized  British  repub- 
lic.  Secretary  of  Un-War.  .  .  . 

Dare  to  be  a  Daniel  Carson  Goodman.  Write 
That  Novel.  Don't  procrastinate,  don't  temporize. 
Do  It  Now,  reserving  all  rights  of  translation  of 
words  into  action  in  all  countries,  including  the 
Scandinavian.  Full  detailed  instructions  as  to  the 
actual  writing  follow. 

You  may  not  have  noticed  it,  but  even  so  suc- 
cessful a  novelist  as  Robert  W.  Chambers  is  care- 
ful to  respect  the  three  unities  that  Aristotle  (wasn't 
it?)  prescribed  and  the  Greeks  took  always  into 
account.  Not  in  a  single  one  of  his  fifty  novels 
does  the  popular  Mr.  Chambers  disregard  the  three 
Greek  unities.  Invariably  he  looks  out  for  the 
time,  the  place  and  the  girl. 

If  Aristotle  recommended  it  and  Robert  W. 
Chambers  sticks  to  it,  perhaps  you,  about  to  write 
your  first  novel,  had  better  attend  to  it  also. 

Now,  to  work  I  About  a  title.  Better  have  one, 
even  if  it's  only  provisional,  before  you  begin  to 


Writing  a  Novel  203 

write.  If  you  can,  get  the  real,  right  title  at  the 
outset.  Sometimes  having  it  will  help  you  through 
— not  to  speak  of  such  cases  as  Eleanor  Hallowell 
Abbott's.  The  author  of  Molly  Make-Believe,  The 
Sick-a-Bed  Lady  and  Old-Dad  gets  her  real,  right 
title  and  then  the  story  mushrooms  out  of  it,  like 
a  house  afire.  Ourselves,  we  are  personally  the 
same.  We  have  three  corking  titles  for  as  many 
novels.  One  is  written.  The  other  two  we  haven't 
to  worry  about.  They  have  only  to  live  up  to  their 
titles,  which  may  be  difficult  for  them  but  will  make 
it  easy  for  ourselves.  We  have  a  Standard. 
Everything  that  lives  up  to  the  promise  of  our 
superlative  title  goes  in,  everything  that  is  alien  to 
it  or  unworthy  of  it,  stays  out.  This,  we  may  add 
parenthetically,  was  the  original  motive  in  institut- 
ing titles  of  nobility.  A  man  was  made  a  Baron. 
Very  well,  it  was  expected  that  he  would  conform 
his  character  and  conduct  accordingly.  Things 
suitable  to  a  Baron  he  would  thenceforth  be  and 
do,  things  unbefitting  his  new,  exalted  station  he 
would  kindly  omit.  ...  It  works  better  with  books 
than  with  people,  so  cheer  up.  Your  novel  will 
come  out  more  satisfactorily  than  you  think. 

Which  brings  us  to  the  matter  of  the  ending. 
Should  it  be  happy  or  otherwise?  More  words 
have  been  wasted  on  this  subject  than  on  any  other 
aspect  of  fictioneering.  You  must  understand 
from  the  very  first  that  you,  personally,  have  noth- 


204  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ing  whatever  to  say  about  the  ending  of  your  story. 
That  will  be  decided  by  the  people  of  your  tale  and 
the  events  among  which  they  live.  In  other  words, 
the  preponderant  force  in  determining  the  ending 
is — inevitability. 

Most  people  misunderstand  inevitability.  Others 
merely  worry  about  it,  as  if  it  were  to-morrow's 
weatlier.  Shall  we  take  an  umbrella,  they  ask 
anxiously,  lest  it  rain  inevitably?  Or  will  the  in- 
evitable come  off  hot,  so  that  an  overcoat  will  be 
a  nuisance?  Nobody  knows,  not  even  the  weather 
forecaster  in  Washington,  If  there  were  a  corre- 
sponding official  whose  duty  it  would  be  to  forecast 
with  equal  inaccuracy  the  endings  of  novels  life 
would  go  on  much  the  same.  Readers  would  still 
worry  about  the  last  page  because  they  would  know 
that  the  official  prediction  would  be  wrong  at  least 
half  the  time.  If  the  Ending  Forecaster  prophe- 
sied: "Lovers  meet  happily  on  page  378;  villain 
probably  killed  in  train  accident"  we  would  go 
drearily  forward  confident  that  page  378  w^ould  dis- 
close the  heroine,  under  a  lowering  sky,  clasped  in 
the  villain's  arms  while  the  hero  lay  prone  under  a 
stalled  Rolls-Royce,  trying  to  find  out  why  the  car- 
buretor didn't  carburete. 

Inevitability  is  not  the  same  as  heredity.  Hered- 
ity can  be  rigorously  controlled — novelists  are  the 
real  eugenists — ^but  inevitability  is  like  natural  se- 
lection or  the  origin  of  species  or  mutations  or  O. 


Writing  a  Novel  205 

Henry :  It  is  the  unexpected  that  happens.  En- 
vironment has  Httle  in  common  with  inevitability. 
In  the  pages  of  any  competent  novelist  the  girl  in 
the  slums  will  sooner  or  later  disclose  her  posses- 
sion of  the  most  unlikely  traits.  Her  bravery,  her 
innocence  will  become  even  more  manifest  than 
her  beauty.  The  young  feller  from  Fifth  avenue, 
whose  earliest  environment  included  orange  spoons 
and  Etruscan  pottery,  will  turn  out  to  be  a  lowdown 
brute.  Environment  is  what  we  want  it  to  be,  in- 
evitability is  what  we  are. 

You  think,  of  course,  that  you  can  pre-determine 
the  outcome  of  this  story  you  are  going  to  write. 
Yes,  you  can !  You  can  no  more  pre-determine  the 
ending  than  you  can  pre-determine  the  girl  your 
son  will  marry.  It's  exactly  like  that.  For  you 
must  come  face  to  face,  before  you  have  written 
50  pages  of  your  book,  with  an  appalling  and  in- 
spiring Fact.     You  might  as  well  face  it  here. 

14 

The  position  of  the  novelist  engaged  in  writing 
a  novel  can  only  be  indicated  by  a  shocking  exag- 
geration which  is  this :  He  is  not  much  better  than 
a  medium  in  a  trance. 

Now  of  course  such  a  statement  calls  for  the  most 
exact  explanation.  Nobody  can  give  it.  Such  a 
statement  calls  for  indisputable  evidence.     None  ex- 


2o6  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

ists.  Such  a  statement,  unexplained  and  unsup- 
ported by  testimony,  is  a  gross  and  unscientific  as- 
sumption not  even  worthy  to  be  damned  by  being 
called  a  hypothesis.  You  said  it.  Nevertheless,  the 
thing's  so. 

We,  personally,  having  written  a  novel — or  may- 
be two — know  what  we  are  talking  about.  The 
immense  and  permanent  curiosity  of  people  all  over 
tlie  planet  who  read  books  at  all  fixes  itself  upon 
the  question,  in  respect  of  the  novelist :  "How 
does  he  write?"  As  Mar\'  S.  Watts  remarks,  that 
is  the  one  thing  no  novelist  can  tell  you.  He 
doesn't  know  himself.  But  though  it  is  the  one 
thing  the  novelist  can't  tell  you  it  is  not  one  of 
those  things  that,  in  the  words  of  Artemus  Ward, 
no  feller  kin  find  out.  Any  one  can  find  out  by 
writing  a  novel. 

And  to  write  one  you  need  little  beyond  a  few 
personalities  firmly  in  mind,  a  typewriter  and  lots 
of  white  paper.  An  outline  is  superfluous  and 
sometimes  harmful.  Put  a  sheet  of  paper  in  the 
machine  and  wTite  the  title,  in  capital  letters.  Be- 
low, write :  "By  Theophrastus  Such,"  or  whatever 
you  happen  unfortunately  to  be  called  or  elect,  in 
bad  taste,  to  call  yourself.     Begin. 

You  will  have  the  first  few  pages,  the  opening 
scene,  possibly  the  first  chapter,  fairly  in  mind ;  you 
may  have  mental  notes  on  one  or  two  things  your 


Writing  a  Novel  207 

people  will  say.     Beyond  that  you  have  only  the 
haziest  idea  of  what  it  will  all  be  about.     Write. 

As  you  write  it  will  come  to  you.  Somehow. 
What  do  you  care  how?  Let  the  psychologists 
stew  over  that. 

They,  in  all  probability,  will  figure  out  that  the 
story  has  already  completely  formed  itself,  in  all 
its  essentials  and  in  many  details,  in  your  subcon- 
scious mind,  the  lowermost  cellar  of  your  uninter- 
esting personality  where  moth  and  rust  do  not  cor- 
rupt, whatever  harm  they  may  do  higher  up,  and 
where  the  cobwebs  lie  even  more  thickly  than  in 
your  alleged  brain.  As  you  write,  and  as  the  re- 
sult of  the  mere  act  of  writing,  the  story,  lying 
dormant  in  your  subcellar,  slowly  shakes  a  leg, 
quivers,  stretches,  extends  itself  to  its  full  length, 
yawns,  rises  with  sundry  anatomical  contortions 
and  advancing  crosses  the  threshold  of  your  sub- 
consciousness into  the  well-dusted  and  cleaned  base- 
ment of  your  consciousness  whence  it  is  but  a  step 
to  full  daylight  and  the  shadow  of  printed  black 
characters  upon  a  to-and-fro  travelling  page. 

In  other  words,  you  are  an  automaton;  and  to  be 
an  automaton  in  this  world  of  exuberant  originality 
is  a  blissful  thing. 

Your  brain  is  not  engaged  at  all.  This  is  why 
writing  fiction  actually  rests  the  brain.  It  is  why 
those  who  are  suffering  from  brain-fag  find  recrea- 
tion and  enjoyment,  health  and  mental  strength  in 


2o8  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

writing  a  short  story  or  a  novel.  The  short  story 
is  a  two  weeks'  vacation  for  the  tired  mind.  Writ- 
ing a  novel  is  a  month,  with  full  pay.  It  is  true 
that  readers  are  rather  prone  to  resent  the  wide- 
spread habit  of  novelists  recuperating  and  recover- 
ing their  mental  faculties  at  their  readers'  expense. 
This  resentment  is  without  any  justification  in  fact, 
since  for  every  novelist  who  recovers  from  brain- 
fag by  writing  a  work  of  fiction  there  are  thousands 
of  readers  who  restore  their  exhausted  intellects 
with  a  complete  rest  by  reading  the  aforesaid  work 
of  fiction. 

Of  course  the  subconscious  cellar  theory  of  novel- 
writing  is  not  final  and  authoritative.  There  is  at 
least  one  other  tenable  explanation  of  how  novels 
are  written,  and  we  proceed  to  give  it. 

This  is  that  the  story  is  projected  through  the 
personality  of  the  writer  who  is,  in  all  respects,  no 
more  than  a  mechanism  and  whose  role  may  be 
accurately  compared  to  that  of  a  telephone  trans- 
mitter in  a  talk  over  the  wire. 

This  tlieory  has  the  important  virtue  of  explain- 
ing convincingly  all  the  worst  novels,  as  well  as  all 
the  best.  For  a  telephone  transmitter  is  not  re- 
sponsible for  what  is  spoken  into  it  or  for  what  it 
transmits.  It  is  not  to  blame  for  some  very  silly 
conversations.  It  has  no  merit  because  it  forwards 
some  very  wise  words.  Similarly,  if  the  novelist  is 
merely  a  transmitter,  a  peculiarly  delicate  and  sen- 


Writing  a  Novel  209 


sitive  medium  for  conveying  what  is  said  and  done 
somewhere  else,  perhaps  on  some  other  plane  by 
some  other  variety  of  mortals,  the  novelist  is  in  no 
wise  to  blame  for  the  performances  or  utterances  of 
his  characters,  or  clients  as  they  ought,  in  this  view, 
to  be  called ;  the  same  novelist  might,  and  probably 
would,  be  the  means  of  transmitting  the  news  of 
splendid  deeds  and  the  su|>erb  utterances  of  glorious 
people,  composing  one  story,  and  the  inanities,  ver- 
bal or  otherwise,  of  a  lot  of  fourth  dimensional 
Greenwich  Villagers,  constituting  another  and  in- 
finitely inferior  story.  .  .  .  To  be  sure  this  explan- 
ation, which  relieves  the  novelist  of  almost  all  re- 
sponsibility for  his  novels,  ought  also  to  take  from 
him  all  the  credit  for  good  work.  If  he  is  a  pain- 
fully conscientious  mortal  he  may  grieve  for  years 
over  this;  but  if  his  first  or  his  second  or  his  third 
book  sells  100,000  copies  he  will  probably  be  will- 
ing, in  the  words  of  the  poet,  to  take  the  cash  and 
let  the  credit  go.  Very  greedy  men  invariably  in- 
sist on  not  merely  taking  the  cash  but  claiming  the 
credit  as  well;  saintly  men  clutch  at  the  credit  and 
instruct  their  publishers  that  all  author's  royalties 
are  to  be  made  over  to  the  Fund  for  Heating  the 
Igloos  of  Aged  and  Helpless  Eskimos.  But  the 
funny  thing  about  the  whole  business  is  that  the 
world,  which  habitually  withholds  credit  where 
credit  is  due,  at  other  times  insists  on  bestowing 
credit   anyway.     There   have   been   whole   human 


2IO  Why  Authurs  Go  Wrong 

philosophies  based  upon  the  principle  of  Renuncia- 
tion and  even  whole  novels,  such  as  those  of  Henry 
James.  But  it  doesn't  work.  Renounce,  if  you 
like,  all  credit  for  the  books  which  bear  your  name 
on  the  title-page.  The  world  will  weave  its  laurel 
wreath  and  crown  you  with  bays  just  the  same. 
Men  have  become  baldheaded  in  a  single  night  in 
the  effort  to  avoid  unmerited  honor  and  by  noon 
the  next  day  have  looked  as  if  they  were  bacchantes 
or  at  least  hardy  perennials,  so  thick  have  been  tJie 
vine  leaves  in  their  hair,  or  rather  on  the  site  of  it. 

.  .  .  W'iiich  takes  us  away  from  our  subject. 
Where  were  we?  Oh,  yes,  about  writing  your 
novel.  .  .  . 

As  soon  as  you  have  done  two  or  three  days* 
stint  on  the  book — you  ought  to  plan  to  write  so 
many  words  a  day  or  a  week,  and  it's  no  matter 
that  you  don't  know  what  they  will  be — as  soon 
as  you've  got  a  fairish  start  you  will  find  that  you 
have  several  persons  in  your  story  who  are,  to  all 
intents  and  purposes,  as  much  alive  as  yourself  and 
considerably  more  self-willed.  They  wall  promptly 
take  the  stor>'  in  their  hands  and  you  will  have 
notliing  to  do  in  the  remaining  50,000  words  or 
more  but  to  set  down  what  happens.  The  extreme 
physical  fatigue  consequent  upon  writing  so  many 
words  is  all  you  have  to  guard  against.  Play  golf 
or  tennis,  if  you  can,  so  as  to  offset  this  physical 
fatigue  by  the  physical  rest  and  intellectual  exer- 


Writing  a  Novel  211 

cise  they  respectively  afford.  Auction  bridge  in  the 
evenings,  or,  as  Frank  M.  O'Brien  says,  reading 
De  Morgan  and  listening  to  the  phonograph,  will 
give  you  the  emotional  outlet  you  seek. 

15 

No  doubt  many  who  have  read  the  foregoing  will 
turn  up  their  noses  at  the  well-meant  advice  it  con- 
tains, considering  that  we  have  largely  jested  on  a 
serious  subject.  We  take  this  occasion  to  declare 
most  earnestly,  at  the  conclusion  of  our  remarks, 
that  we  have  seldom  been  so  serious  in  our  hfe. 
Such  occasional  levities  as  we  have  allowed  our- 
selves to  indulge  in  have  been  plain  and  obvious, 
and  of  no  more  importance  in  the  general  scheme 
of  what  we  have  been  discussing  than  the  story 
of  the  Irishman  with  which  the  gifted  after-dinner 
speaker  circumspectly  introduces  his  most  burning 
thoughts. 

We  mean  what  we  have  said.  Writing  a  novel 
is  one  of  the  most  rounded  forms  of  self -education. 
It  is  one  of  the  most  honorable  too,  since,  unlike  the 
holder  of  public  office,  the  person  who  is  getting 
the  education  does  not  do  so  at  the  public  expense. 
We  have  regard,  naturally,  to  the  mere  act  of  writ- 
ing the  novel.  If  afterward  it  finds  a  publisher  and 
less  probably  a  public — that  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  author,  whose  self -culture,  intensive,  satisfying 


212  Why  Authors  Go  Wrong 

and   wholesome,   has  been  completed  before  that 
time. 

Whether  a  novelist  deserves  any  credit  for  the 
novel  he  writes  is  a  question,  but  he  will  get  the 
credit  for  it  anyway  and  nothing  matters  where 
so  wonderful  an  experience  is  to  be  gained.  Next 
to  being  hypnotized,  there  is  nothing  like  it;  and 
it  has  the  great  advantage  that  you  know  what  you 
are  doing  whereas  the  hypnotic  subject  does  not 
No  preparation  is  necessary  or  even  desirable  since, 
even  in  so  specific  a  detail  as  the  outline  of  the 
story  the  people  of  your  narrative  take  things  en- 
tirely in  their  own  hands  and  reduce  the  outline  to 
the  now  well-known  status  of  a  scrap  of  paper.  .  .  . 
We  talk  of  "advice"  in  writing  a  novel.  The  best 
advice  is  not  to  take  any. 


THE  END 


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